


the ghost in the back of your head

by befehlvonganzunten (blueprintofyourpast)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: (sort of?), Angst, Dimension Travel, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Falling In Love, First Kiss, Hopeful Ending, Idk man... this is some trippy bullshit, May Parker Is the Most Important Person in Peter Parker's Life, Michelle Jones Needs a Hug, Panic Attacks, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Protective Michelle Jones, Protective Peter Parker, Slow Burn, Suspense, Temporary Character Death, Time Travel, i said what i said
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:28:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 31,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22667776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueprintofyourpast/pseuds/befehlvonganzunten
Summary: “I think something went wrong when we were on that bus.”She lifts her head, her eyes sad and full of worry, and he wants to tell her that she’s right. He wants to tell her that he knows what happened and that there’s no need for her to be afraid because he has a plan that’ll get them out of here. He wants to tell her that she can count on him because he knows how to fix this, but he doesn’t know shit.A snowflake settles on the tip of his nose.He takes her hand, entwines their fingers, and all he wants to do is wake up. All he wants forthem bothis to wake up, stretch their limbs, and roll their eyes because they’re still stuck in traffic, still forced to listen to Flash brag about god-knows-what, still two kids on an underwhelming school trip on a sunny Thursday morning in late May....Or: After the Snap, Peter and Michelle find themselves stranded in a bleak parallel universe. With no means to get back home and only the rumble of thunder to accompany them, they’ve got plenty of time to get to know each other.
Relationships: May Parker (Spider-Man) & Peter Parker, Michelle Jones & Peter Parker, Michelle Jones/Peter Parker, Ned Leeds & Peter Parker, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 78
Kudos: 181





	1. prologue

**Author's Note:**

> hello! before you start reading the prologue and the first chapter of this weird clusterfuck of a fic, here are some things you might want to know:
> 
> \- if you don’t like angst, be warned: some parts of this fic are rather dark. the ending, however, will be a happy/hopeful one.
> 
> \- peter and mj are the main characters. other characters will make an appearance or be (briefly) mentioned in the course of the story, but keep in mind that, first and foremost, this is a spideychelle fic. **edit: i have to exclude may from that. she became more important with each new chapter, which is something i didn't expect, but now i wouldn't want to have it any other way.**
> 
> \- the story title is a direct quote from _spanish sahara_ by foals. in fact, the basic idea of this fic was heavily inspired by an entire list of foals songs. they’re an amazing band and i highly recommend them. (also: go and see them live if you get the chance. they’re fucking incredible on stage.)
> 
> well, that’s pretty much it for now. as some of you may already know, i’m a non-native speaker/writer and part of why i’m submitting my stuff online is because i love to learn. with that being said, please know that constructive criticism is welcome and appreciated :)

Somehow, dying feels a lot like drowning. Not that Peter knows what drowning actually feels like. It’s just that the way his lungs constrict – the way they just stop _working_ – deludes him into thinking that he’s choking on seawater. And that should be impossible given the fact that he’s standing in the middle of a grey, galactic desert.

The air is shot through with all kinds of crushed-up debris. Microscopic particles that tickled his nose and made him sneeze three times in a row when they left the space ship and stepped into the ruins. Tiny grains of rust and sand, heaps of golden-red pixie dust that get swept up by the blazing wind. There’s no water, no vegetation except for huge, dilapidated aircrafts and skyscrapers that lie scattered around them like felled, metallic trees. He’s never seen buildings like these before, he’s never seen that kind of architecture, and he can’t even begin to understand why he’s so keen on directing his attention to these piles of scree just now. Maybe it’s because his instincts are screaming bloody murder at him. Maybe it’s because they beg him to hold on to something – _anything_ – while he’s losing his focus, his balance, his breath.

“Mr Stark?”

His mouth is full of salt.

He didn’t think it would end like this when he jumped out of that school bus and flung himself into battle. He had a feeling, a vague sense of foreboding that pricked his temples and sizzled along his forearms. It was a fleeting sensation, too short-lived for him to fully comprehend. As always, it soon bowed down to those familiar shots of excitement and adrenaline that seem to take over whenever he’s swinging around the city, doing his bid and looking out for the little guy.

“I – I don’t –”

He blinks, shudders, stumbles. He didn’t think his biological drive to protect would blind him like that. He didn’t think it would leave him drowning on dry land one day. He slumps forward as his healing powers kick in to fix whatever it is that is wrong with him all of a sudden. He can feel them spin out of control, those magical powers he used to rely on in the past, trying to keep his bones from collapsing and his organs from caving in. Trying, struggling. Failing over and over again.

“Mr Stark, I don’t feel so good.”

His speech is laced with the worst kind of panic. It’s the slow kind that eats you up inside while you’re still in denial. The crippling kind that licks up your spine, sends your senses into overdrive and your pulse into a tailspin. The cruel kind that only comes to torture you when it’s already too late. It’s the kind of panic Peter has felt only once in his life before and there’s a fraction of a second that’s cluttered with memories of kind eyes, kind words, and blood-stained teeth. It all conflates into a tangle of blurry colours and muffled sounds, and then there’s a room full of candles, church pews, and funeral wreaths. May’s sitting beside him, dabbing at her wet cheeks with trembling fingers, and –

“You’re all right,” Tony says in that cool, collected manner of his while the horror in his eyes tells a whole different type of story, “You’re all right.”

It must be the most ridiculous thing that has ever come out of his mouth and it breaks Peter’s heart a bit because he knows that Tony cares about him. He may have told him so a couple of times, may have clad his fondness in thick layers of snappy sarcasm back then, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s always been clear as day that the man felt responsible – not only for Spider-Man but also for the boy wearing the mask.

“I don’t know – I don’t know what’s happening.”

He slumps forward again and this time, it’s too much. This time, his knees give out and he knows that not even Tony will have the strength to pull him back to his feet. Not even Tony – white as dolomite and drenched in his own blood, his eyes wide and red and watery – will come up with some marvellous last-minute solution.

“I don’t wanna go… I don’t wanna go, sir”, the words leave him in a sob, a whine, a desperate quiver, “Please? Please, I don’t wanna go, I don’t wanna g –”

His voice breaks, but he can’t stop talking. He can’t stop fighting against the dread, the chokehold. The numbness in his chest, the daunting realisation that this is it and that it’s too soon. That he’s only a kid. That there’s so much he wanted to see, so much he wanted to do before –

He drags his gaze away from his mentor and the crushing guilt that’s already blooming on his face like a vile flower. He can’t do this right now. He can’t muster up the courage to acknowledge the fact that Tony’s going to be all alone here on Titan, bleeding profusely and with no hope of making it back home in time. No. He can’t do this. Couldn’t do this even if he wanted to. He’s too tired. He looks at the wispy golden clouds instead, and it’s a beautiful sight if you think about it. Calming in a way.

But he’s still fighting, still drowning, still choking out pleas and apologies, even though he starts to sound drowsy. Even though there’s no pain anymore, just fuzzy memories of May talking a mile a minute whilst burning minced meat and tomatoes into a frying pan. Memories of Ned sitting cross-legged on the floor in his room as they work on another Lego project. Memories of Mr Delmar scratching Murph’s head. Memories of Mr Harrington stumbling over his words, of Flash puffing his chest, and of Michelle giving him the finger. Memories of Happy blushing furiously when the pretty German receptionist tells them to enjoy his time in Berlin. Memories of Black Widow smirking at him on their way to the airport. Memories of Tony telling him he’s an Avenger now.

It’s easy.

Easier than he thought it would be.

Easier than fighting, easier than drowning.

He doesn’t _want _to go. He wants to stay – _he wants to stay, he wants to fight, he wants to fix this_ – but in the end, thinking about the people in his life and telling himself that they’re going to be okay makes it so easy for him to give in. He takes a shuddering breath and leaves, those sweet memories dancing behind his eyelids.__


	2. thunder

The first thought that flares up in his mind is that the sky looks really strange. It’s deep red, interspersed with thin streaks of purple like the fresh pulp of a blood orange. It’s too bright, though, too rich in colour. Too clean of the smog he’s known since he was a preschooler with an emergency inhaler in his backpack.

The second thought that strikes him is that it’s dead quiet except for the faint noise of water sloshing and gurgling in his ears.

Shit.

Is he drowning?

He’s not the most talented swimmer, so he tries not to panic. He shifts his weight a bit and lets out a small sigh of relief: the ground beneath him is soft but solid, the waves that tug at his body too weak to drag him back to wherever he came from. He must’ve been floating on his back for quite a while, must’ve been drifting around aimlessly until the current washed him up on the shoreline and left him there. Groaning with exhaustion, he pulls himself into a sitting position.

He needs to start _somewhere_. He needs to check his surroundings and the area in general to get a hint at where he is and how he got here because God knows he can’t remember. Did he fight someone and hit his head a little too hard? Did he pass out in the process? Or did he just fall asleep over his English homework again and is having one of those weird dreams that make no sense at all but feel super real and leave you all dazed and woozy in the morning? He sighs, looks down at himself, and frowns. He’s wearing his suit sans the mask. It’s a new one he doesn’t recognise, completely made of metal and maybe a little too flashy for his taste, but at least, he won’t be naked and defenceless if something happens to him. The _place_ , however –

The place is drab and desolate. No people, no animals, no trees or plants or buildings. No silhouette of a city looming on the punch-pink horizon, no footprints, no signs of life or civilization to begin with. It’s sand and water as far as the eye can reach. An endless lake and an endless dune, bathed in red and solitude. He grits his teeth before he finds the strength to stand up. The water sucks at his ankles. He pulls a face. It’s bad, but it’s not a total disaster. He’s seen some weird shit since he became Spider-Man, and so far, he’s always managed to get out of even the most mind-boggling situations. All he has to do is stay calm, _focus_ , and look out for clues.

“Karen?”

As expected, he receives no answer since he’s not wearing his mask and doesn’t even know how this new suit works. The material and the colour scheme basically scream Tony Stark, so there’s probably some coded gesture or button designed to make his mask appear out of nowhere. He starts to tinker with it, taps his web shooters, and nothing happens. He taps the spider emblem on his chest plate and nothing happens. He lets out a string of curse words that would make his aunt smack him upside the head if she could hear him – and nothing happens. He pouts and kicks at the wet sand. Obviously, May can’t smack him upside the head because she’s not here and he can’t call her or Ned because he doesn’t have his phone with him. And that’s a bit inconvenient because he knows he _should_ call them. He should call _someone_ , probably Tony because Tony is Tony, and Tony always knows what to do.

“This sucks.”

With his suit out of service and his short-term memory slightly out of whack, it looks like he’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way, which means stumbling around and wallowing in his annoyance until he finds a clue, an exit, or an enemy to fight – or until he wakes up from this admittedly boring nightmare he’s currently trapped in for some reason. He groans again, not in the mood for this bullshit and also a little irritated by that faint taste of salt in his mouth. It rings a bell, reminds him of something, but he can’t come up with any specifics.

He moves up to where the water can’t reach him. He doesn’t know where to go, but he knows he wants to leave. He knows he wants to get out of here more than anything else, so he drags his feet along the lakeside. A small breeze tickles the back of his neck while the sound of the waves and the slick squelch of sand and mud yielding to his weight follow him in his wake.

.

.

.

He has no idea how much time has passed until he sees a shadow in the distance and picks up his pace. It’s the first interesting thing he’s come across since he got here, his first real clue besides a couple of black, fist-sized rocks he found earlier. By the time he’s reached his destination, a hopeful grin has made itself at home on his face. Despite his small social circle, he’s never been good at being by himself. He just doesn’t like to be alone with his thoughts. It’s why he can’t shut up during class or AcaDec, or when he’s out on patrol. It doesn’t really matter if his clue turns out to be a friend or a foe. At least, he’ll have someone to talk to. He clears his throat, draws a little closer.

“Um, excuse me?”

His clue, a lean figure that’s curled up in the sand his feet, lets out a small groan. He takes them in carefully. He can make out skinny jeans, a black tank top, a dark green cardigan, and – he cocks his head to the side – a pair of black Converse high tops with rainbow-coloured shoelaces.

“U-Um…”

Another garbled groan that does nothing to soothe his nerves. He swallows, crouches down in front of his clue, and takes a deep breath before he places a hand on where the cardigan has slipped off their shoulder. Their skin is smooth and light brown.

He clears his throat again.

“Are you okay, sir? Ma’am? Are you hur –”

The rest of his question is replaced by a shriek when his clue snaps out of their rigour and darts out of his grasp with a yelp and their legs kicking at him, hitting him right in the chest and causing him to flail his arms and fall back on his ass.

“Wait!”

He jumps to his feet and takes a step backwards, holding up his arms in surrender and waiting for his clue to calm down. Behind him, the waves hum a dreary tune and he can feel his blood drain from his face when his clue finally lifts their head. He can feel his stomach topple to the ground as soon as their eyes meet. They’re same eyes that tend to drill holes into his back when he’s doing pull-ups in gym class. The same lips that twitch with resentment when Flash whines and complains during AcaDec. The same dark curls he sometimes watches bounce and disappear behind a corner in the hallway after lunch break. His jaw drops.

“What the – _Michelle?!_ ”

Her glare is murderous. There’s seaweed tangled in her hair, bits of sand glittering on her cheeks and neck, and her clothes are soaked. She looks like an angry siren. A sea goddess that was tricked into coming ashore by some devious fisherman.

“What are you doing here?” he wheezes, surprise and confusion pushing his voice up, up, up to the point where he would be embarrassed if it weren’t for the cold rush of terror that shoots through his veins because Michelle shouldn’t be here with him. She shouldn’t be here, period.

“What are _you_ doing here, loser?” she throws back at him whilst moving to get up; she waves dismissively when he hurries to her side, and slaps his hands away when he reaches out to help her stand.

As soon as they’re eye to eye, she gives him a quick once-over and then her face turns blank, which is never good, least of all in a situation like this, so he looks down at his suit, then back at her and down at his suit again and – _oh, fuck_. Just like that, the terror in his blood clears the way for a sudden need to play dumb and deny. In the end, however, the million terrible excuses that dance on the tip of his tongue die down in a whimper when Michelle crosses her arms over her chest and nails him to the spot with a scowl.

“Guess I was right then,” she says.

“R-Right about what?”

Her scowl deepens.

“You’re Spider-Man.”

“Well, yeah, but – wait, you knew?!”

She quirks a brow and apparently, that marks the end of the conversation for her because instead of providing him with an answer – a sarcastic comment, an insult, a logical explanation as to how she found out, for how long she’s known, and why she didn’t tell him – she turns on her heel and starts to walk away. Speechless, he looks up to the sky where the deep red hues have started to morph into bulging bruises of black and purple, whirling around and growing in size like clouds before a thunderstorm.

He shakes off a shudder. Nightmare or not, there’s got to be a reason why she’s here. Why his first (and probably only) clue is Michelle Jones of all people. And besides that, there’s that terror again, catching him off guard and messing with his senses as a low rumble leaps down onto the shoreline, clearly telling him that something about meeting one of his classmates in a place like this isn’t just bad.

It’s _wrong_.

It’s a warning sign, alarming in a way that propels him to move and catch up with her, wrap his hand around her elbow, and meet her scowl with a stern glare of his own. She blinks and stops walking, drops of water spilling from her wild curls.

“What.”

“Michelle,” he implores, tightening his grip on her. There’s no use in hiding his apprehension: things have switched from weird to downright distressing and he has to find a way to fix this, “How did you get here?”

There must be something in his tone that makes her realise that this is serious because suddenly, her dour expression melts away to reveal small traces of concern that carve wrinkles into her forehead.

“I – I don’t know,” she mutters whilst shifting her gaze to her feet and then to the lake. He lets go of her arm immediately, shocked into silence by her display of unease, “We were on our way to MoMA, remember? I was sitting behind you and Ned. I was busy reading, but I could hear you guys talking about Star Wars or some other nerdy crap. Flash was there, too. He was doing a livestream and everyone was kinda pissed because we were stuck in traffic,” the more she talks, the faster and louder she gets, and he doesn’t know what to do. He’s never seen her in such an anxious state before, “Cindy, Betty, and Abe were gushing over that new show on the CW, and Jason – I don’t know – I think Jason was telling them not to spoil everything?”

Another rumble rings out, but Michelle keeps talking, keeps conjuring up detail after detail until Peter feels like his head is going to explode. He remembers now. He remembers jogging up to the school’s parking lot where his classmates were already getting on the bus, remembers Mr Harrington chiding him for being late again and then hurrying him into the vehicle. He remembers the motor coming to life with a rattle and Ned dragging him into a discussion about the similarities between Darth Vader’s suit and the type of medieval armour that used to be worn by samurai warriors. He remembers that he was dangling on the edge of sleep by the time Ned had veered off into the territory of pre-industrial Japanese military culture, and he remembers jerking out of his half-slumber when something – a tingle? a feeling? – caused the hairs on his forearms to stand upright, and –

And that’s it. That’s all he remembers, but there must be more, right? There must be something he’s missing. Something he forgot and – _no_. No, no, no. It’s not real. It’s just a nightmare. He’s going to wake up any minute. He’s going to wake up and see that it was all in his head.

“I guess I just fell asleep and now – a-and now I’m here.”

Her words, slowed down again but jittery all the same, smack him in the face as if to snap him out of his trance. He blinks to get the pictures out of his head when Michelle’s gasp grabs his attention and hurls it towards the far end of the lake.

“’The fuck is _that_?” he hears her whisper, and he watches on as a big chunk of midnight blue slowly comes off the sky and tumbles down to pierce the water surface with a crackling whump, “ _Jesus Chri_ – Peter? Peter, are you all right?”

His blood runs cold.

_You’re all right._

His pulse roars in his ears.

Another rumble.

“Fuck! Are you even listening to me?”

Another cloud falls into the lake.

_You’re all right._

“Peter?”

Then another, then another. Each one a little closer to the shoreline.

_You’re all right._

He can’t move.

_You’re all ri –_

“PETER!”

He rips around to face her and the terror is dialling his senses up to eleven. She’s scared. Scared and soaked and beautiful, and she’s relying on him, she’s counting on him. She’s not supposed to be here.

“We gotta leave”, he pants, the syllables strung together in a rushed, incomprehensible mess, “We gotta leave right now.”

She gives him a sharp nod and for the split of a second, the corners of her mouth curl up into a tight smile, “I’m pretty sure that’s the smartest thing you’ve ever said.”

His eyes bulge at the fact that she just tried to make a _joke_ when they’re about to get crushed by the fucking sky, but he doesn’t have the time to dwell on it because she’s already running towards a particularly huge heap of sand. He follows her without hesitation and the clouds start to rain down on them, shaking the ground and making them totter around like a pair of drunks. He’s there to catch her when she stumbles backwards, begging her to just keep going because maybe, if they climb real quick and hide behind the slip face, they’re going to be safe. He grabs her hand and pulls her along with him, hoping that he’s going to wake up once they’ve made it to the other side of the hill. Hoping that he won’t remember any of this by the time he’s back home.

“Oh, shit!”

A coal-black cloud – shaped like a spear and as big as a ten-storey building – hammers down a few feet in front of them just as they’re about to reach the hilltop, and there’s a chance that this isn’t a nightmare. There’s a chance that this is real after all. Because it sure as hell _feels_ like it’s real.

It feels real when the impact flings them across the shoreline along with spouts of sand and chips of dark stone. It feels real when he tries to wrap himself around her but loses her to the storm, her name rough, raw, and urgent in his throat, and it feels real when his back hits the ground with a force that knocks the air out of his lungs before his vision turns as black as the sky that tears itself apart above him.

.

.

.

Next thing he knows, his eyes fly open and the sky is a soft mix of white and grey. It reminds him of winter. Of thick coats, hot chocolate, and May’s collection of ridiculous Christmas tree decorations. She has these multi-coloured fairy lights and a whole box of ornaments that look like dogs, doughnuts, dinosaurs, and sushi rolls. Every year, their tree looks like someone vomited glitter all over it and every year, they spend Christmas Eve watching ‘Die Hard’ and ‘The Muppet Christmas Carol’ over cranberry punch, half-burned snickerdoodles, and Chinese take-out. He misses May. He feels like he hasn’t seen her in years, and he’s ready to brand the thought as utter nonsense when memories of his nightmare sweep back in to infiltrate his mind.

“Michelle,” he croaks while a hand on his chest stops him from sitting up too quickly. Apparently, he’s still asleep or unconscious because apparently, he’s still wearing the new, flashy, inoperative and therefore, useless suit.

“Slow down, loser. I’m right here.”

He finds her kneeling beside him, frowning at something behind his shoulder. Her clothes are dry now and she looks a little less shaken than she did back on the shoreline, but there’s still a piece of seaweed peeking out from behind her left ear. He reaches out to remove it, brushes the edge of her jaw with his thumb by accident, and tries not to cringe too hard at the heat that bites his cheeks when she goes rigid at his touch and narrows her eyes at him.

“Um – I was just – look!”

He dangles the seaweed in front of her face.

“Gross.”

He almost snickers at how she leans back and screws up her nose in disgust, but then he remembers the lake and the clouds, and his laugh gets stuck in his throat.

“So, that really happened,” he says.

“Yup.”

“You okay?”

She shrugs, looks down at her lap, and starts to pick at the sleeves of her cardigan. He doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know how to comfort her, doesn’t know if she wants him to comfort her. He takes in the chaos that’s spread out before him, and his insides shrink up into a tight ball when he recognises the place. The snowed-in football field, the red bricks. The bell tower that crowns the main building and the slim white columns that frame the main entrance. The little front court where he and Ned greet each other every morning with their personalised ‘friendshake’.

They’re in Queens.

They’re _home_ , stranded at the steps of Midtown Tech.

And it’s a ghost town.

It’s grey, dusty, and deserted. Some of the neighbouring houses look like they were abandoned in a hurry, some others look like they were raided. There’s trash and litter ticking along the sidewalk. There’s cracked pavement and frost-glazed macadam. There’s broken furniture, broken windows, broken cars – all of it spilled out on the streets. He feels like he’s going to throw up.

“Peter?”

Her voice is soft, so terribly, terribly soft that he almost doesn’t hear her. He turns his head and he can see that she’s trying her best to keep her expression blank, but just like when they were trapped at the lake, a flicker of anxiety takes over and ultimately betrays her.

“Y-Yeah?”

“I think something went wrong when we were on that bus.”

He wants to tell her that she’s right. He wants to tell her that he knows what happened and that there’s no need for her to be afraid because he has a plan that’ll get them out of here. He wants to tell her that she can count on him because he knows how to fix this, but he doesn’t know shit.

A snowflake settles on the tip of his nose.

He takes her hand, entwines their fingers, and all he wants to do is wake up. All he wants for them both is to wake up, stretch their limbs, and roll their eyes because they’re still stuck in traffic, still forced to listen to Flash brag about god-knows-what, still two kids on an underwhelming school trip on a sunny Thursday morning in late May.

“I’m sorry,” he says eventually.

She sniffles and squeezes his hand. The gesture makes his eyes burn. He still has no idea why they’re here, but he can’t lie to her and he can’t just let her down either. The shoreline broke apart at the sound of thunder and falling clouds – and it brought them here, so maybe it’s going to happen again? Maybe they don’t have to look for clues, maybe they just have to wait for another storm to get back home? He peers down at their fingers and feels a small smile tugging at his lips. A couple of snowflakes have gathered in her hair. They look good on her, way better than the sand and the seaweed. His smile broadens a bit as he comes up with an idea that could make waiting for another near death experience a little more fun. He nudges her shoulder.

“You wanna see where I used to hide my suit?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> soooo, i hope you’re a little confused at this point? because that’s what i was aiming for when i started writing this thing? 
> 
> there’s more to come, so i’d love see you again next time :)


	3. marble

Miraculously, Midtown Tech wasn’t raided. Or rather, not as heavily as the blocks that surround it. Some windows are cracked, yes, and there’s dust _everywhere_ – the trophy cases are empty, the lights don’t work, and the clocks have stopped at three – but that’s about it in terms of visible damage. Everything else looks pretty much the same, from the gold-and-blue posters promoting pep rallies and senior prom in the cafeteria to the framed football jerseys and the mural painting near the staircase. Still, there’s something spooky about walking around in a building that’s usually filled with so many different sounds – the sound of phones dinging, rumours being spread, and lockers being slammed shut, the sound of the school bell ringing, shoes squeaking on the floor, and Principal Morita ordering some poor soul not to run so fast – when it’s completely quiet. When there’s just no one _there_ and you’re all alone.

Except that Peter isn’t all alone. Michelle’s here with him, strolling along beside him, pointing at various spots whilst letting him in on a couple of observations she’s made back when everything was still relatively normal. Her face is void of any particular kind of emotion, but he doesn’t miss the humour in her voice when she tells him that Mr Dell has a habit of taking two steps at a time when he’s in a hurry, or that Cindy keeps a stash of Kit Kat bars in her locker because it’s her favourite post-exam comfort food.

“… and this is where I caught Flash using his phone to check his teeth after lunch break once. He was scared I was going to tell everyone,” she says as they pass a drinking fountain on the second floor, “I didn’t, though. I’m not _that_ mean.”

The impulse to tell her that she doesn’t strike him as mean at all is strangely persistent and quite hard to suppress. He finds that he doesn’t need to do much to keep the conversation going, not even in the short moments of silence that rise up in-between her spills of Midtown trivia. He finds that, although he’s dying to leave this place and get back home, he actually enjoys listening to her. A part of him blames it on his instinctive aversion to solitude, while another part blames it on pure nosiness. After all, Michelle Jones is an enigma, never acting like she’s interested in talking to people unless there’s a chance for her to kick off a lengthy discussion about socio-political issues.

She’s a loner, most likely by choice, and unlike him, she doesn’t seem to mind doing things alone. If anything, she seems to _prefer_ doing things alone, which is something about her Peter respects, maybe even admires, but doesn’t fully understand. Consequently, the fact that she’s talking to him now – the fact that _she’s_ the one who _initiated_ the talking – kinda blows his mind. It also makes him worry that she’s going to stop talking to him all of a sudden because with Michelle, you never really know. You never really know when, let alone why she’s going to stop paying attention to you. So, if he ends up putting on a show when he lifts half a ton worth lockers to show her where he used to hide his first suit and back-up web fluid until Homecoming, it’s totally not because he wants her to keep paying attention to him or be impressed with him or anything like that.

No, sir.

Not at all.

It wouldn’t work out anyway because she’s definitively not the easiest person to impress. She’s not like Ned who was all excited and bursting with questions, and she’s not like May who cried a lot, sat him down, and made him swear not to get carried away before she allowed him to go on patrol again. No, Michelle is Michelle: blank-faced and impossible to read when he tells her about his early days as Spider-Man.

“You were all over YouTube,” she says when he’s recounting that one night he stopped a group of car thieves and webbed them to a lamp post, “Kinda looked like you were running around and doing backflips in your PJs.”

“What?!”

His cheeks grow warm and he groans. She’s not entirely wrong about the whole pyjamas thing. Truth be told, he had to use an old jogging suit and his least favourite sweater for the original version because believe it or not, creating a real superhero costume that’s meant to 1) protect your identity, 2) get the best out of your abilities, and 3) _keep you alive_ , is a tricky and rather expensive venture when you’re not the crazy rich owner of a world-famous tech company. And sure, Peter remembers feeling silly when he put it on for the first time, but, as impractical as his original suit proved to be in the world of modern crime-fighting, digging it out of his closet to look at it every now and then quickly became some sort of sacred ritual for him.

He’s proud of that suit. It’s a sweet reminder of how it all started and how far he has come since then. It’s fond and, at times, wistful nostalgia weaved into cheap cotton, and it’s something he made with his own hands. Same goes for the goggles and web shooters, of course, which Tony undoubtedly helped to improve and optimise with all kinds of useful gadgets, but the groundwork? The basic design of the suit? The whole concept of Spider-Man? Well, that had been Peter’s idea, so he can’t help but get a bit defensive.

“It was a good suit,” he mumbles sheepishly, “I mean, I was wearing it when I was fighting the Vulture and – and I _won_ , so –”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t bulletproof or anything, right?” she sweeps her gaze across his chest, causing him to stand a little straighter, “I’m just wondering how it kept you safe because you didn’t look like you almost died in a plane crash when you skipped AcaDec three days later.”

There’s some mild curiosity sprouting in her eyes. He takes it as a win.

“I heal pretty fast. Like, you could punch me in the face and I probably wouldn’t even bruise.”

She squints at him.

“Are you asking me to punch you in the face?”

“What? No!”

“You sure? ‘Cause I’d totally do it,” she says, “You know, for science.”

He squirms and blushes. At this point, he wants to punch _himself_ in the face.

“Can we please stop talking about this?”

“Okay.”

Shrugging lightly, she wanders off and leaves him trailing after her like a lost puppy. It’s what she does, he realises with a faint grin, and for some reason, he’s not too disappointed by her reaction (or lack thereof) to his alter ego. Chances are his brain would’ve melted into a puddle if she had been impressed, so he’s good. He’s fine. They’re both fine, actually, considering the circumstances, which are far from lucky or advantageous. They’re fine when they reach the end of the hallway and decide to check out the inner courtyard where, according to Michelle, some teachers and the kitchen staff like to smoke and complain about their shitty lives during breaks. They’re fine when they make it back to the first floor and come across a wall in the main hallway that’s smeared with a pitch-black graffiti saying ‘All Hail Thanos’. They’re fine because who knows who or what this Thanos is supposed to be.

“It’s probably just a stupid meme,” she says, and Peter would love to agree with her if it weren’t for the warning bells going off in his head. He stops in front of the wall and takes in the rough lines of the graffiti.

They went to MoMA before summer break and here, it’s freezing cold. Here, there’s ice and snow and a school building that looks like it hasn’t seen any students in months. Here, everything points to some terrible event – a riot, a war, an epidemic, or a natural disaster – having caused people to flee the city without looking back. He brings a hand to the top of his head, scratching at the nervous twinge that’s sprawling there. The bus, the lake, and now this. Something about it doesn’t add up and he’s tired of groping in the dark.

“It’s either that or a clue,” he says eventually, his throat clicking as he struggles to keep his voice from wavering with doubt.

“A clue?”

“Yeah, like, something that’s gonna help us get back home.”

“I know what a clue is, loser,” she rolls her eyes, but there’s no heat behind it, “I just didn’t know you’re a _detective_ now. You got a fancy trench coat and a fedora to go with your suit?”

If things were different and less unsettling, he’d counter her sarcasm with a wry smile or, depending on the situation and the amount of embarrassment it would arouse on his part, some half-hearted backtalk. Right now, however – right here, in this strange, fucked-up version of New York – he can feel his senses try to tell him something he just can’t get his head around. And he’s not used to that. He’s not used to waking up in a strange place with no memory of falling asleep. He’s not used to wearing a suit he can’t get to operate. He’s not used to the absence of people moving around in a metropolis that’s famous for being full of light and noise. He’s not used to any of this and it’s driving him insane.

“Um, Peter?”

She sounds worried and he hates it. Hated it when he found her at the lake, hated it when they turned up outside the school. It’s another thing about this place he’s not used to, and somehow, it’s worse than everything else. Somehow, it makes his skin pucker and tingle with the same terror that crept up on him as the clouds came down.

“I think I found a clue.”

She’s staring out of a broken window, her face twisted in concern. He turns his back to the wall and walks up to her, and the sight of it – the sight of the courtyard, the sight of her clue – pries his eyes wide open and tugs at his stomach until he fears that he might throw up for real this time.

.

.

.

“This – this can’t be real, right?”

“Well, it _looks_ pretty real to me, Peter.”

He peers at her from the corner of his eye.

“Are you cold?”

“No,” she growls, her teeth clattering, “I’m confused.”

As much as he’d like to tell her ‘Yep, hard same’, the muscles in his mouth just refuse to do the work for him. He keeps his eyes on her for a moment, watches her wrap her arms around her middle before he steers his focus back to their newest clue. It’s a monument. A memorial, carved from mouldy cardboard and pinned to one of the birch trees that cross the courtyard in a perfect diagonal. It’s a pile of letters, plush animals, burnt-out candles, and rotten flowers sitting in the dirty snow.

It’s a list of names.

It’s him.

It’s Michelle.

It’s Ned and Flash and Jason and Betty.

It’s a list of death dates set to the day they got on that goddamned bus.

He looks at Michelle again, the terror stitched to his back like a lancinating second skin. Her lips are moving around words he can’t hear, and he needs to focus, he needs to snap out of it. He can’t freak out right now – or ever. Not in front of her, not in front of anyone. He’s Spider-Man, for fuck’s sake. He’s supposed to keep a cool head and fix the problem because that’s what he does. That’s his job.

“… doesn’t really make any sense. I mean, Yasmin wasn’t even there with us on the trip. She was sick or something, but apparently, she died that day, too.”

His heart is a hangman’s drum, throbbing in his wrists and ears. It’s a nauseating sound. It’s hard, heavy, and harrowing.

“W-What did you say?”

“We’re dead,” the detachment in her voice is calculated, undermined by a sad tremor that hits him like a shot to the guts, “Or we just, you know, disappeared for a couple of months and missed out on some epic, apocalyptic endgame. And now we’re back, _except_ for the people who disappeared with us,” she sighs and suddenly, her body deflates, “I guess I’m out of my depth here, Spidey, so take your pick.”

She bows her head, hides her face behind a curtain of curls. She sounds as tired and defeated as he feels, and she’s shaking uncontrollably now. It’s devastating, seeing her like this when she’s usually so bold and fearless. He licks his lips, not sure what would happen if he pulled her into a hug, if she would break down or push him away. Tragically, what he is sure of is that he wouldn’t know how to deal with either outcome, so he swallows against the lump in his throat and puts a hand on her upper arm to console her (and maybe himself as well). He waits for her to shake him off and when she doesn’t, his words leave him in a choked murmur.

“We’re not dead.”

“Peter –”

“No, we’re – w-we’re _here_ and – a-and –”

His hand slides off her arm and once again, he’s losing his tongue. He wishes he could find a few uplifting sentiments that would dispel, or at least alleviate her despondence. He wishes it wasn’t that hard because May does it all the time when he’s feeling anxious or depressed. She’s an expert on lifting other people’s spirits, and even though she tends to struggle with lifting her own spirits at times – especially around March – Peter’s learned enough from his aunt to step in and do it for _her_ , be it in the form of a tight embrace, long talks about everything and nothing, or just a cup of chamomile tea.

“Can we go back inside please?”

He knows how to take care of people, he knows how to help, a little bit at least. It’s another part of his job, but right now, it’s a pointless endeavour. He knows _that_ , too. He knows there’s nothing he could say to lift Michelle’s spirits or make her change her mind. He knows this isn’t something he’ll be able to brush off as a wacky dream once he’s back home because he knows – despite him refusing to believe it – he might never get back home.

“Peter?”

He knows there’s no plan, no cure and no solution. Nothing left but a sky made of white marble and the possibility that whatever it is that happened to him and Michelle and so many of their friends, whatever it is that sucked the life out of their city and caused it to wither away in the cold, most likely got them killed. The possibility that it was too much. The possibility that it was too strong, too abrupt, and too inevitable for him or Tony or the rest of the Avengers to prevent from happening. Because that’s what Spider-Man would’ve done. He wouldn’t’ve knelt down or given up, he wouldn’t’ve left. He would’ve fought, he would’ve tried. He would’ve done everything in his power to protect his friends. He would’ve – 

_I don’t wanna go._

_I don’t wanna go._

_I don’t wanna go._

The terror sinks its teeth in his chest, shakes him like a wild felid shakes its prey, and he screws his eyes shut for a moment, still lost in an echo of a jumbled memory he can neither decode nor reassemble when Michelle turns and makes her way back to the building, the harsh crunch of her steps cutting through the silence. The air in his lungs rushes out of him, only to be punched back down his throat a second later. He doesn’t know what happened. He doesn’t what’s happening right now. He doesn’t know why they’re here and why he can’t remember. He doesn’t know if they’re dead or asleep, and he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s supposed to do.

He follows her footsteps, wiping at his cheeks.

.

.

.

He finds her in the library because of course he does. There’s little to nothing he or any of their classmates know about Michelle, but her love for books is well-documented. It’s actually the first thing that tends to cross his mind whenever he’s thinking about her – not that he was thinking about her a lot before they got here, but yeah. She likes to read. It’s not a secret. It’s quite impressive, actually. Like, three weeks before their trip to MoMA, she came to school with a different book every day: ‘Robinson Crusoe’ on Monday, ‘The Female American’ on Tuesday, ‘Foe’ on Wednesday, ‘Oryx and Crake’ on Thursday, and ‘The Island of Dr Moreau’ on Friday. Her posture was hunched, her gaze more intense than the sun itself. No-one dared to speak to her that week, not even the teachers. It kinda bugs him that he can’t remember which book she was reading when they were on the bus.

“Fancy seeing you here,” she tells him from where she’s perched on the windowsill next to the Modern Lit section.

Her voice is so obnoxiously light that you wouldn’t believe she’d been on the brink of a panic attack a few minutes ago. He’s lingering a couple of feet away from her, still overwhelmed by the sight of the memorial. _He can’t freak out._ He needs to calm the fuck down. Taking a step forward, he frowns at the copy of ‘The Lovely Bones’ in her lap. Obviously, it’s her way of giving him a broad hint because while he’s never read the book, he remembers watching the film version with Ned when they were still in middle school. He remembers bawling his eyes out at the end of the movie.

“You okay?”

Her scowl is back in full force.

“What do you think?”

“You’re not okay.”

“Cool. So, you’re not a total idiot then.”

He tells himself not to take offence. She’s lashing out at him, maybe blaming him for being here, maybe even rightly so, but he won’t let it get to him. He wants to help her, and if helping her means that he has to be a scapegoat and bear her anger, so be it. It’s a hundred times better than being forced to watch her crumble with fear and not knowing what to do. She opens her mouth and he’s ready for another scathing remark, but all she does is drop the book on the windowsill and hop back to her feet. The shreds of light that bleed through the window make her hair shimmer like bronze and his heart stumbles over a beat or two when she gives him a pained smile.

“I’m sorry. I don’t do feelings and I guess _this_ ,” she twirls her hand, summarising the sheer madness of their journey so far, “Is making me emotional. It’s gross and lame and I don’t like it, but I shouldn’t take it out on you.”

He’s pretty sure that the look on his face could only be described as ‘flabbergasted’.

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not.”

She moves over to one of the racks and taps her index finger against a couple of cracked spines, her eyes skittering over each shelf as if she’s looking for something specific. His brain tells him that he’s watching her in her natural habitat, and he finds the thought endearing. She must’ve spent hours here, diving from one imaginary world into the next while he was drooling over Liz and skipping class like he was actively trying to ruin his educational career (which is kinda-sorta exactly what he was doing back then, being _so beyond high school_ and all.)

“By the way, this is where I made out with Harry Osborn before he transferred to Le Rosey.”

His brows shoot up to his hairline and he nearly chokes on his breath. Screw ‘flabbergasted’, he’s absolutely _shell-shocked_ now. He remembers Harry. They were friendly with each other. They once held a group presentation on the tricarboxylic acid cycle, which gained them an A+ despite Peter’s fear of public speaking, and they would team up with Ned in shop class. They even shared a sympathetic smile at the end of freshman year when Harry announced that his father was going to send him off to a private boarding school in Switzerland. Still, if Midtown Tech were set in a high school movie, they would’ve found themselves at opposite ends of the food chain with Harry being the charming, slightly arrogant rich kid girls and boys alike would fawn over, and Peter and Ned carving out a miserable existence as your stereotypical science nerds. So, the idea that a popular guy like Harry and a self-professed outcast like Michelle used to get along _that_ well sounds fucking ridiculous.

“I had no idea you guys were a thing back then!” he shrieks, his voice probably high and squeaky enough to make dogs go crazy, “Wait, _were_ you guys a thing? Were you, like, together? W-Was it – was it serious?”

She gives him a pointed glare.

“You sound like a tabloid columnist.”

“You read tabloids?!”

“Ew, no,” she says with a tinge of pink colouring her cheeks, “And we weren’t together. He was immature and annoying. He’d always come here to talk to me or ask stupid questions about my reading list, so I kinda despised him,” she pauses and shrugs, “Didn’t change the fact that I liked his face, though.”  
He stares at her, somewhat awe-struck.

“Wow.”

It’s pretty much all he can say after such a revelation. He never went to great lengths to get to know Michelle – hell, no one really did – and he’s starting to regret that because apparently, she has a penchant for collecting random bits of knowledge about their teachers and classmates. Apparently, she considers herself mean even though she isn’t. Apparently, Harry Osborn had a crush on her. Apparently, she kissed Harry Osborn and kept it a secret when everyone else in her position would’ve bragged about it forever. Apparently, she likes to read tabloids and totally sucks at pretending that she doesn’t. Apparently, there’s a shit ton of other things he doesn’t know about her because he never bothered to ask, and apparently, he’s now on a mission to redeem himself.

But where to start?

Luckily, he doesn’t get very far because just when he’s about to unleash an endless spate of inane questions she probably wouldn’t answer anyway, Michelle is there to bring him back down to earth.

“So, what’s the plan?”

“Huh?”

She leans against the rack, her arms and ankles crossed, her lips pursed in rumination.

“Assuming that you’re right and we’re not dead, which, just so you know, is a theory I still highly doubt, what’s the plan? Should we wait? Should we look for more clues?”

“U-Um…”

It’s a good question, a legit question. It’s a question that’s actually important given the fact that they’re still here, and he’s wracking his brains, grasping for an answer when a tell-tale rumble rolls in and brings the terror back to life.

The fucking terror.

That fucking feeling in his gut.

They jump at the same time, snapping their heads around to look out of the window. She gasps and he freezes, his chest set tight like it’s crammed with gravel. There’s a crack in the sky, splitting it in two, and his pulse is a mess.

_This isn’t good._

He grabs her hand and tells her to run.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for the lovely comments regarding the previous chapter. i hope you liked this one too <3


	4. touch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **trigger warning**
> 
> there's a small part in this chapter that refers to possible aftereffects of the first snap (e.g. recession, prison breaks, mass hysteria, etc.). i wrote the part several weeks ago and i didn't expect those aftereffects to be so similar to what's currently going on due to the corona crisis, which is why i decided to mark the part. if you feel like you have to skip it: please do.
> 
> i also added the "panic attacks"-tag just to be on the safe side. this chapter _is_ dark, but it has some lighter moments, too.

The clouds look like wispy chunks of cotton candy. They slump to the ground, funnel through the streets, and they crash into roofs and cars without a sound. They burst like soap bubbles before they merge with the snow. The crack is still there – as is the rumble – but there’s something strange about it now because it’s almost beautiful, almost comforting, so it shouldn’t feel like a threat. It shouldn’t stir up his senses, but the terror is insistent, piercing his skin and pounding in his ribcage when he tugs at Michelle’s hand and pulls her down the stairs with him, grateful that she’s not fighting back.

“We need to go,” he says.

“Go where?”

For once, he can’t really tell if she’s scared. (He prays that she isn’t.) There’s so much about this place that scares _him_ , so much he’s unsure of, and yet he’s safe in the knowledge that seeing her scared is something he simply cannot stomach. The sound of their steps skitters around the stairwell, the rumble nothing more than an afterthought that wafts in through the broken windows along with fresh snow and powdery peels of milky white fog. His senses keep misfiring, keep telling him to turn around and run away as fast as he can. That feeling, though – that flicker of stubbornness – tells him to keep going. So, that’s what he does whilst holding on to her.

As hard as it is, he has to admit that he was lying to himself earlier because back in their world, he _did_ think about Michelle from time to time – just not in an obsessive manner or in a way that could be blamed on basic bristling teenage hormones. No, no. Back in their world, she’d pop up in his mind when he was on patrol, swinging around Flushing and passing the public library, or when he was on the 7 train in the early morning, sitting bodkin between college students and commuters with his phone in his hand, scrolling through the newsfeed and reading a book review or an article about the legacies of second-wave feminism.

Back in their world, she’d occupy his thoughts occasionally like she was a fleeting component of his stream of consciousness: too vague and arbitrary to really catch his attention, but now she’s just as perplexed and out of her element as he is. Now she’s with him all the time, filling the silence with silly stories about their friends and letting him watch her move back and forth between bursting bookshelves, which somehow helped to calm him down. Now she’s his only link to what used to be, so needs to keep her close. He needs to keep her safe at all costs.

“Last time this happened, we ran away,” he squeezes her fingers, scared, among so many other things, that she’s going to wrest herself free, “We got crushed and we should’ve died, but we didn’t. We ended up here where everyone thinks we’re dead.”

She stops in her tracks, but she doesn’t let go of his hand. She doesn’t blink, doesn’t move. The warmth of her palm is too weak to reach through his suit, but he allows himself to revel in the idea of it.

“I was thinking that maybe we shouldn’t run away this time. Maybe we should face it,” he gulps and tries not to flinch, knowing full well that he must sound like a crazy person, “M-Maybe we’ll get back home if we run towards it.”

With one stair step filling up the space between them, their difference in height is more tangible than ever. Her brows are furrowed, her lips slightly parted. She’s staring him down and the flutter in his chest becomes more urgent the longer they maintain eye contact. She’s going to object and he can’t blame her: it’s hard enough to trust your instincts when they’re compromised, hard enough to move forward when everything around you implodes and transforms into something else every other minute. It’s hard enough to stand your ground and believe that you’re right when everything around you tells you that you’re wrong. He can only imagine how hard it must be for her to trust him and the tiny fragment of hope he’s clinging to. Still, he moves his thumb to the inside of her wrist and finds their hearts trembling in sync. Swallowing hard, he thinks about the lake and the abandoned houses and how he wants to get her out of here so bad that he can barely take it.

He wants her back in their world. He wants her back in that bus, wants her back in school. He wants her stern during AcaDec, bored during English, and completely engrossed in her book of the day during lunch break. He wants her to forget about this once they’re back home. Yeah, he wants her to roll her eyes when he’s going to tell her about this weird dream he had last night – and maybe he wants her to smile at him, too.

“Please.”

She draws in a slow breath, looks out of the window and then back at him. Somehow, her beauty always hits him in the most inconvenient moments, and if he was struggling to avoid her gaze before, he’s downright incapable of doing it now. He just can’t look away because suddenly, there’s so much she’s not telling him. Suddenly, there’s so much for him to read. Suddenly, there’s doubt and fear and pain and fatigue – but underneath all of that there’s also determination, feeble and depleted like a piece of coal that’s about to burn out entirely unless someone’s going to blow the fire back to life. And God, does he want the fire back.

“Okay,” she says, and his relief explodes out of him in a tense exhale, causing her to stiffen and avert her gaze. He’s embarrassed for the both of them, slanting his head to hide the red blotches he can feel tickle his cheeks like small electric shocks. They’ve never spent so much time together and it’s starting to affect him in ways he doesn’t know how to handle.

She flexes her fingers once they’ve reached the entrance hall. The door is a floodgate for gusts of snow and shredded clouds, and he starts to wonder if it’s really just the two of them in this world. His heart groans with despair when he tries to think about a world without Ned’s spine-crushing hugs or Tony’s nonsensical, fast-paced rambling about quantum physics and motor oil. It shatters when he tries to think about a world without May.

“Sorry,” he hears himself whisper, loosening his grip a little when he realises that he must’ve been holding on to her too tightly, “Just – just stay close.”

“You, too.”

She taps his knuckle with the tip of her index finger, and maybe they’re about to do something stupid, maybe they’re about to get home. In the end, it doesn’t really matter because they can’t stay here. They need to find an exit or another clue. They need to move. Palms pressed together, they step into the off-white funk, and for the first time since they got here, he thinks that they’re headed in the right direction.

.

.

.

There’s nothing out there except for the clouds doing butterfly spins in the frosty breeze. Everything’s cold and white as salt. The only sound that’s powerful enough to subsist in the silence is the steady _ba-thump_ of his heart, the only sensation solid enough to ground him the weight of her hand in his. Intellectually, he knows that he shouldn’t depend on her like that, but it looks like there isn’t much intellect left in him since he arrived at the lake. It looks like reason forsook him somewhere between the moment he mistook her for a clue and the moment they stumbled upon the memorial.

He shudders.

The fucking memorial. His throat still grows tight when he thinks about all those names on the cardboard and the horrible implications that came with it. Horrible thoughts, horrible clues, horrible visions of Ned and the rest of his class dying in a car crash or some other awful disaster Spider-Man had somehow failed to avert. He sets his jaw. That’s not how it happened.

“So, when did you find out?” He has to ask because it’s been quiet for a good while and because he can’t keep bouncing from one worst case scenario to the next.

“Washington.”

“What gave me away?”

“Your height, your posture. The way you disguised your voice to sound all manly and the fact that you called me _Ma’am_ ,” she doesn’t miss a beat and he kinda loves that, “Your acting skills are atrocious, is what I’m trying to say.”

His grin is bashfulness, self-mockery, and faux-indignation all rolled into one. It grows wider when she raises their entwined hands to poke his side with her elbow.

“ _Ow_.”

“Oh, stop it.”

She snorts and he joins her. Somehow, the terror tends to recede whenever he’s talking to her, and he doesn’t know what to make of that because what does he know at all at the end of the day? Well, he knows that Michelle is super smart, extremely sarcastic, and brutally honest. He knows that she’s really into art, that she became a little less scary after Homecoming, and that her friends get to call her by her nickname. He knows that they’re not really friends (yet) and that he’d like to do something about that. He knows that, once their back home, he’s going to try and be more inclusive. Like, maybe he’s going to ask her if she’d like to join him and Ned for a movie marathon because now that he got a glimpse of her, he doesn’t want to go back to treating her like a stranger. He wants to talk to her on a regular basis, wants to get to know her better and find out what makes her tick – not because she’s some sort of mystery that needs to be solved, but because he wants to be her friend.

“You think anyone else knows?”

“Nah.”

“Why not?”

“Well, it’s not like anybody really pays attention to you.”

Her words sting more than expected, but he decides not to give them too much weight. Instead, he goes on autopilot and zeroes in on something about her answer that makes him feel warm, fuzzy, fluttery, and maybe even a little smug.

“But you do? I – I mean, before. You – um – you were paying attention to me?”

He clamps his mouth shut and wants to scream at himself because _what the fuck_ is he doing? His mind is reeling. There are way too many possibilities of how this conversation could end and he’s terrified of every single one of them. In the best case, she’s going to laugh at him or tell him that he’s wrong. She’s going to tell him that he shouldn’t feel special because she’s always observant and he just happens to be the most obvious, most transparent person on the planet. In the worst case, she’s going to shut down and ignore him. She’s going to let the silence creep back in and create a rift between them. _She’s going to let go of him and –_

“N-No?”

And – and holy shit, Michelle sounds flustered.

Wait, no, scratch that.

She _is_ flustered.

He can see it in the way she’s biting her lower lip and scowling at the wall of white ahead of them like she’s trying to burn a hole into it. Her face is pinched – maybe a bit flushed, too? – and the small touch of smugness that came over him seconds ago dissolves at a dizzying speed, making room for something close to pink-cheeked astonishment. He’s feeling flattered and he can’t explain why. It’s probably because he never dared to entertain the idea of her paying attention to him. The whole concept seemed ridiculous, given her blasé attitude and genuine disinterest in other people. He considered himself a mere blip on her radar – just like she was on his – but now here they are: wandering around in a freezing void, holding hands and spilling secrets step by step.

Huh.

Turns out that he really underestimated her. He doesn’t get to feel guilty about it, though, because by the time he’s ready to probe and dig a little deeper – hopefully without disrespecting her boundaries and coming across like a nosy douchebag – the wind sweeps up bits of ice and faraway noises that quickly morph into disembodied scraps of news segments and radio announcements. At first, he can barely make out what the voices are trying to tell him, but all too soon, he’s caught in a whirlwind of chopped-up tales about a gruesome domino effect that brought out the worst in people and kicked off heavy waves of mass hysteria all over the world, starting with – 

**\- - - - - - - This is where the trigger warning applies - - - - - - -**

“… ongoing riots in Leipzig, Bangkok, Johannesburg, and Mexico City, leading to …”

“… stock prices to drop to a historical low. With no acting President or Secretary of Commerce in charge it is only a matter of time until …”  
“… foodbanks will be closed in the Atlanta metropolitan area after they were overrun by citizens yesterday evening. In a press conference, local authorities stated that they …"

“…continue to struggle with an appropriate provision of care for millions of orphans in the United States alone, resulting in …”

“… several prison breaks in the past three weeks. We advise all of our viewers to stay alert since there is no …”

“… end in sight, but the good news is that Queen Ramonda has agreed to step in as interim ruler, a decision that is reportedly backed by the remaining members of the Wakandan Council. The coronation ceremony will take place in …”

“… Rutherford, New Jersey, where three people were shot during a riot. According to the Rutherford Police Department, the victims were …”

“… members of the Children of Thanos, a global underground movement in favour of the political aftereffects of the so-called Snap – a term, which is used as a synonym for the global tragedy that prompted …”

“… a representative of Stark Industries to make an official statement regarding the whereabouts of Tony Stark, who hasn’t made a public appearance in the past six months, which leaves the question if …”

“… we will ever come to terms with the fact that half of the world’s population is gone.”

**\- - - - - - - End of trigger warning - - - - - - -**

The wind dies down and so do the voices, but the words remain and they feel like knives: they slip between his bones and gut him from within as his brain goes into overdrive to find an explanation as to why the voices were wrong. Why there’s no way that this could’ve happened, why Tony wouldn’t go AWOL and turn his back on everyone all of a sudden. And – and the graffiti in the hallway, this cult the voices were talking about. Why would you praise someone for killing your neighbours, friends, and family? Why would you celebrate the deaths of so many innocent people?

Everything comes to a standstill – his steps, his lungs, his fucking heartbeat – and he latches onto Michelle, desperate to distract himself from the terror. Her eyes are wide and unfocussed, her chest jumps and falls with short, rapid breaths. She’s hyperventilating, squeezing his hand until it almost hurts.

Fuck.

“Michelle,” he chokes out despite doing his best not to sound alarmed, “Hey, you need to breathe with me, okay? Can you – can you do that?”

She can’t.

It’s more than obvious. She’s staring at him, staring right through him, and she’s shaking like a leaf. He needs to fucking do something before he starts to panic, too, so he brings their hands to his chest and makes sure that she can feel it move underneath all the metal.

“In and out, okay? In and out,” he keeps her hand pressed against his suit, keeps inhaling through his nose and exhaling through his mouth – slowly, so that she can watch, listen, and catch up with him, “Remember when Flash invited us to this game night before Christmas break? He didn’t want to invite me, but I guess he had to because it was an AcaDec thing,” he pauses and feels little less helpless when she blinks at him, “Good, you’re doing really good. Just stay with me, yeah?”

She blinks again and then gives him a nod, actively acknowledging him and the fact that he’s standing in front of her. For a second, he’s so relieved that he doesn’t know if he wants to laugh or cry or kiss her. In the end, he just keeps running his mouth because maybe that’s all he can do for her right now. Maybe talking a mile a minute will somehow bring her back.

“Okay, so Flash didn’t actually want me to come and I didn’t actually wanna go because – well, I have responsibilities and a patrol schedule and everything – but Ned talked me into it,” he fights the urge to sob that comes with talking about his best friend, “He’s – He’s really good at talking me into doing stuff I don’t wanna do, you know?”

Another nod.

She’s listening.

This is good. This is going somewhere.

“He – He t-talked me into g-going, too,” she rasps with her eyes fixed on their hands and the black-and-gold spider legs that peek out from under them. A stray tear cuts down her left cheek, “He s-said I had to g-go ‘cause it wouldn’t be the same without the t-team captain.”

“He was right about that.”

He means it.

She shakes her head at him.

“He was being corny and sentimental, so I couldn’t say no,” her voice is back to normal and her brows and mouth twist as if she’s still angry about the fact that she’d been manipulated like that, “He was smirking like a mafia boss when I told him I was going to be there.”

He can’t help but smile at her. Her curls are in disarray and she’s visibly shaken, but she’s breathing with him, complaining about something stupid and mundane from the past, and her pulse is slowing down to a steady pace.

“It wasn’t bad, though. I mean, sure, the music was terrible, but there was hot chocolate and Flash didn’t throw a fit when we were playing Risk,” he says, thinking back to how Michelle ate an entire bowl of reindeer corn and bobbed her head to the horrendous Christmas party remix that rang throughout Thompson manor while she dominated the board game by forming and breaking alliances like a pro, “It was fun.”

Her gaze snaps up to his face and having her look him in the eyes again sends a funny jolt down his spine.

Jesus.

These weird things his body tends to do when they’re close like this – the rise in body temperature, the dizziness, and that goddamned flutter – kinda remind him of how he feels when he’s in-between shooting webs. When he’s dropping like a dead weight and enjoying the free fall with his veins full of light and sweet, sweet wonder. He can’t put his finger on it, but he knows from experience that it’s probably nothing to be afraid of. It’s just not the right time to dwell on it.

“Thank you,” she says before she barks out a sad little laugh, “God, this is so fucked up.”

He takes her in, silently freaking out over the fact that he’s starting to notice every little detail about her. Details like that one snaggletooth, the handful of barely-there freckles on her nose, or the specks of honey gold in her eyes. The shape and colour of her lips and the tiny little scar on the right side of her chin. Man, he really missed out on a lot of things before everything went to shit.

“It’s gonna be okay,” he says, lamely. She shoots him a doubtful glance, “I’m – I’m serious! There’s this saying, you know? It has to get worse before it gets better,” he shuffles his feet, refrains from wringing his hands to curb his nervousness because doing so would mean that he’d have to let go of her, “It can’t get any worse than this, right?”

She doesn’t dignify him with an answer. Not a verbal one, at least. She just stares at him some more, tilts her head ever so slightly, and then she starts to walk again. And it’s funny because this time, it’s him who’s being pulled along even though chances are that she still thinks they’re dead and that looking for clues is a just giant waste of time. But Michelle is efficient, she’s resourceful. She isn’t a weight he needs to carry on his shoulders. She isn’t some sort of damsel he needs to protect. He knows that in the depths of his heart just like he knows that there’s a key difference between needing and wanting to protect someone. She’s an analyst _and_ a doer. She wouldn’t let him waste time on a task she deems pointless or futile, and somehow, that’s enough for him to follow her lead.

.

.

.

At some point, the fog thins out and reveals a cityscape that’s strikingly different from what they saw when they first got here. It’s different because it’s familiar. Because it looks like good ol’ Queens. Because it looks like nothing happened. Because the sun’s shining down on them, shooing away the snow in record time and dressing trees in bright green bridal gowns. Because the sky is blue and cloudless. Because there’s no chaos, no destruction. But there are no people either – and that’s exactly what prevents him from getting his hopes up.

“This is just getting weirder and weirder,” she mutters beside him as they leave an underpass near Thomson Avenue.

They’re close to his and May’s apartment and it’s making him nervous. He doesn’t want to go home if his aunt isn’t going to be there. Hell, he doesn’t even want to think about it. Fortunately, Michelle isn’t done speaking her mind. In fact, she’s a bit on a roll right now, which he doesn’t mind at all. He doesn’t mind that she’s dragging him through the city, huffing and taking charge like a grumpy tourist guide. He doesn’t mind that she’s holding his hand in a vice grip, or that his heart’s been doing somersaults since they left the school grounds. In truth, he likes it because it’s been a long fucking day and he’s thoroughly exhausted. He likes that they’re here together, that it’s Michelle who’s with him right now, and that she succeeds in putting him at ease without doing much.

“We should go to your place,” she says, and the dumb, anxious six-year-old in him who used be afraid of girls his age goes straight into panic mode.

“Why?!”

His voice is shrill and she lifts a brow.

“You need to rest.”

He almost wants to sigh, almost wants to tell her that it’s not that simple and that he can’t rest, _won’t_ rest until they’ve found a way back home, but something about the way she’s looking ahead strikes him deep down in his belly, and he forgets how to breathe for a second. And she’s right. She’s always, always right: superpowers or not, he won’t be able to get them anywhere if he doesn’t take at least an hour to lie down and turn his brain off. He should know that from his countless fist fights with brawny criminals. Recovery is key, no matter how dire the situation is. And yet – 

“Peter?”

For once, he doesn’t meet her eyes.

He needs to focus.

He needs to be honest with her.

“I’m just scared,” he says.

“Scared of what?”

_Everything._

Being wrong, being right, being dead.

Losing May.

Losing Ned.

Losing you.

Losing to the terror again.

He takes a shaky breath, steels himself for his next words because he can already tell that they’re going to hurt like hell. The sun is merciless, blinding him when they turn the corner and draw closer to what used to be his home. His voice is low, riddled with uncertainty. He’s so tired.

“I’m scared of what we’re gonna find there.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please stay safe and take care of yourselves.
> 
> see you next time <3


	5. salt

Going to his apartment was a bad idea. Peter accepts that as soon as they step over the threshold. Come to think of it, it was a _stupid_ idea, too. It doesn’t matter if there’s proof that he may have lived here for a while – like, the bright orange stains he accidentally burned into the carpet when he was testing out the volcano model he had to build for middle school, or the dent he and his uncle left in the skirting board when they were playing ‘living room hockey’ with a small bag of batteries instead of a hockey puck. It doesn’t matter because it’s not his home anymore.

It’s different.

It’s a different apartment now, filled with different furniture – different shelves, a different couch, different plants, and different bric-a-brac – and it _smells_ different, too. It doesn’t smell like fresh coffee or burnt dinner or the laundry detergent May likes to use. It doesn’t smell like May at all and the realisation that coming here has finally confirmed his worst fears squeezes his heart until it’s nothing more than a fistful of pulp. He sniffles quietly and stares at the floor. The pink streaks of sunlight that lie to his feet look like they’ve been smeared across the wood in a hurry. After a moment, he can feel Michelle’s hand on his shoulder.

“Peter –”

“I need a minute.”

He shakes her off and hurries down the hallway where he passes an arrangement of yellow picture frames, each one holding a happy snapshot of people he’s never seen before. His chest turns into stone once he’s made it into May’s room. The bed is made, the doors of the closet are shut, and everything is in its right place. There’s no chaos, no pile of unfinished Sudoku grids on the nightstand, no collection of dreamcatchers spread out over the headboard. Not even a single photo of Ben.

It’s different.

He spits out a dry sob.

It’s like she’s gone, like she never existed in the first place.

He staggers out of the room again and thinks about how he was helping Michelle with her panic attack less than an hour ago. How all he had to do was talk her through it and how he’s not sure if having her return the favour would be something he could tolerate right now because if it weren’t for her and her _stupid fucking idea_ , he wouldn’t even fucking _be_ here.

“Goddammit.”

Shame comes crashing through him in the split of a second, prompting him to take deep breaths to collect himself. His anger is misdirected. She wanted to help and she failed. He can’t hold that against her. It’s not like she could’ve known or like she forced him to go. He could’ve said no. He heads back to the living area and finds her perched on the edge of the sofa with a newspaper in her hands. She doesn’t acknowledge him. Her head is bowed, her eyes downcast. The notion of her avoiding his gaze out of guilt over bringing him here makes him ill. He clears his throat.

“Um, hey,” even though it’s a little shaky, his voice seems to do the trick. The result, however, takes his breath away – not because the deep red sunset happens to elevate the glow of her skin, but because there’s the same hint of worry in her eyes that shone through when they stumbled upon the memorial and later, the voices in the fog, “What’s wrong?”

She turns the newspaper so that he can inspect the front page. Most of it makes up for the headline – something about the upcoming Sokovian presidential election and how the far-right candidate is expected to win by a landslide – while the rest is plastered with ads, smaller outpours of sensationalism, and the weather forecast. He can’t see in how far any of this is related to their situation. Fortunately, though, she doesn’t waste any time to enlighten him.

“Look at the publishing date,” she says, tapping the top left corner of the page.

He does. And his stomach drops. It drops and drops and drops until he’s sure that the weight of it is going to bring him to his knees. His shoulders slump in defeat before he even has the chance to process the information.

If this is true, it would mean that – 

“Five years,” he chokes out, sweat gathering at his temples and the back of his neck, “We – We were gone for five years.”

“Yeah.”

Her whisper, soft and forlorn, hits him with a force he’s not prepared for. Right now, it could drown out a nuclear blast and it’s like all of the oxygen has been sucked out of the room and he’s motionless again, determined not to freak out even though no one could possibly blame him for doing so at this point.

Five years.

Five years since they went to MoMA.

Five years since the Snap.

Five years since they – presumably, supposedly – died.

Five years.

_Five years._

“What,” something, he can’t tell if it’s despair or defiance, brings his lungs back to life. His mouth falls open and out of it rolls a tidal wave of rage, helplessness, and flat-out bewilderment, “What the fuck.”

“Peter.”

“What the fuck!”

“ _Peter_.”

“No, seriously,” he starts to pace and stops at the windowsill, throwing his hands in the air in frustration, “What the fuck, MJ?!”

He slams both hands down on the windowsill and sends nearly half of it to the floor. The noise settles quickly – as do the dust and the bits of stone – and for a second, Michelle looks like she wants to jump to her feet and run. His body deflates and he stutters out an apology. Usually, it takes a lot until he’s irritated enough to express his anger like that. She must know that since he’s always so keen on being polite at school. He could’ve punched Flash for his snide remarks a thousand times by now, but all he ever does is pretend he can’t hear him because it’s easier that way. God knows what would happen if he lost control over his powers just because his bully was being on a roll again.

Fucking Flash. The Snap took him, too. Him and Ned and the others, but where are they now?

_Where is May?_

The tears come at him and he’s not angry anymore. He’s sad and exhausted and so fucking done with this bizarro-world bullshit. He steps away from the mess he made and flops down next to her on the couch. Their knees bump together and he looks at her profile. She’s fiddling with the newspaper and there’s fear and regret written all over her face. He doesn’t want that. He wants to comfort her – probably just as much as he wants _her_ to comfort _him_. The only problem is that he doesn’t know _how_ he wants her to comfort him, let alone if he’s even allowed to demand any form of comfort from her to begin with. Clearly, she doesn’t strike him as the type of person who’s wild about physical contact – least of all when it’s gratuitous – so he peers down at their legs and resigns himself to the idea that sitting with her like this is more than enough.

“What are we supposed to do now?” he asks then, stumped and bereft because this place is always three steps ahead of them, “I’d say we should keep looking for clues, but every time we find one, things seem to get worse.”

She gives him a wry laugh.

“And here I thought things couldn’t get any worse than this.”

A small, tired smile tugs at the corners of his mouth. He was being a huge dumbass when he said that, naïve in his attempt to cheer her up. He can’t help but appreciate her for seeing his stupidity in a humoristic light.

“We should check out the bridge.”

“The bridge?”

“Queensboro Bridge,” she clarifies, “It’s where we died.”

He blinks at her.

“That’s – that’s actually a pretty good idea.”

“Really?”

If he didn’t know better, he’d say she looks surprised.

“Don’t get me wrong. Your last idea was _terrible_ ,” he says, biting back a grin when her face creases into a scowl, “But you deserve a chance to redeem yourself.”

“Why, thank you.”

Her tone has reverted to its usual dryness and he thinks that this might be the exact form of comfort he was hoping for. It’s something old, something he remembers from before, and while most people wouldn’t deem it as soothing or consolatory, Peter savours the familiarity of it. He savours the familiarity of _her_ : the snark, the sarcasm, and the roll of her eyes. The certainty that even though this place might scare her, it sure does a shit job at changing who she is. The silence, the empty streets they’ve crossed. The twitch of his lips, the hint of her smile. The splatter of freckles on her cheeks and nose, and the curl of her lashes and how the sight of all of that makes him wonder for how long they’ve been looking at each other without saying a single word. The strange impulse to get a little closer. The million frantic questions in his head.

Like, what is this? Is this a moment? Are they having a moment? Is he supposed to say something? Do something? Is he supposed to make an oath? Is he supposed to tell her that he’s going to protect her? Is he supposed to take her hand, too? Is that something he wants to do? If yes, how? Should he just grab it? Should he ask for her permission? What if she says no? What if she thinks he’s being inappropriate because now is not the time to – to do what, exactly? Be nice? Pay her a compliment? Try to, like, _flirt_ with her right after they found out that their situation is even more hopeless and confusing than they though? Make a complete fucking fool of himself for no apparent reason?

He keeps looking at her and she keeps looking at him and he starts to panic. He can feel his eyes grow wide and his palms go clammy. He can feel his heart do a weird little dance in his chest and he wants to slap himself. No matter what he’s going to do, she’s going to think he’s a weirdo. She’s going to think he’s objectifying her or taking her as a nuisance. She’s going to think he wants to protect her because she’s a girl, which is literally the last thing he wants her to think. Because in truth, all he wants is to tell her is that she can count on him – and if he wants to hold her hand for a while as well, so what? It’s not like they haven’t held hands before. It’s an act of comfort. It’s nothing special.

“Are you okay?”

Her voice nearly sends him out of his seat.

“Yeah!” he squeaks, clears his throat, and – in a spontaneous fit of insanity – lowers his voice to sound cool? Relaxed? Laid-back and composed even though he’s sweating bullets right now? “T-Totally.”

She looks unimpressed, a little annoyed with him, too, and – oh. Oh God. He's making a fool of himself. He’s making a fool of himself and he doesn’t even know what it is about her that makes him make a fool of himself. What’s her problem? What’s his problem? And speaking of problems: isn’t there more important stuff he should be worried about? The whole being-stuck-in-a-dystopian-afterlife thing, for example, or the possibility of a new storm spiriting them away to yet another dreadful place? Ugh. He’s _Spider-Man_. He needs to set his priorities straight. With a blink (and a cringe) and his eyes still bulging, he turns away and stares straight ahead at the black TV screen. His pulse keeps pounding in his ears like a metronome. Fast and steady and so fucking loud.

“I, um, I still think you should rest, though,” he hears her mumble, and is he imagining things or does she sound like she’s slightly out of breath? “But maybe not here.”

“Yeah.”

He nearly lost it when he was in May’s room. There’s no way he’s going to stay here if he doesn’t have to. He wrings his hands and shifts his gaze back to the window. All that’s left of the sunset is a yellow shimmer that’ll soon be snuffed out by the picotee blue night sky. He doesn’t like it, so he looks at Michelle again. She’s the smartest person in the room – in every room – and he’s still a nervous wreck. He still wants to protect her. He takes a breath, takes her in, and asks: “Where do we go?”

.

.

.

If someone had told Peter he was going to wind up at _Michelle Jones’s_ place one day, chances are he would’ve laughed his head off – or screeched with fear and ran for the hills. Turns out there’s nothing scary or laughable about her place: it’s just a regular apartment up in Long Island City, about a 16-minute walk from Queens Boulevard.

The neighbourhood seems nice. Lots of stores. Lots of brownstones. Lots of street lamps and hornbeam trees scattered along the road. A deli, a laundromat, and a barber shop. A bunch of thrift stores and black posters promoting a memorial march. If things were different, you could hear people, trains, and bicycle bells. You could hear laughter and shreds of music dribble out of open windows. For a second, he pictures Michelle coming home to a place like this after school. In his imagination, she’d weave through the buzz with her nose buried in a book and her headphones on. She wouldn’t bump into people or turn the wrong corner, though. She’d make sure to stay in the real world whilst blocking out most of it simultaneously. The thought alone puts a smile on his face.

Her apartment is a museum of all things Michelle and he’s weirdly excited, weirdly curious about what he’s going to find here and how it’s going to add to the tiny bits of knowledge he’s gained so far. There’s this general belief that people tend to not be their true selves when they’re in public – that they’re _different_ people when they’re at home – and the idea of Michelle not being her true self, regardless of the setting or the circumstances, doesn’t sit too well with him. As a matter of fact, he finds the idea deeply unsettling, which is why he files it away for another time.

She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t freeze or break into tears when they enter. Obviously, they don’t have a key, but he stopped questioning the logic behind this world quite a while ago. It’s like he’s in a video game – except that it’s no fun and he’s on the verge of a mental breakdown every other minute.

Anyway.

The door falls shut and Michelle flips the light switch a couple of times, giving a noncommittal shrug when her efforts don’t invoke the desired outcome. It’s not at all how he thought she was going to react. It’s better _and_ worse all at once.

“The power’s out,” she states, already breezing past him, “I’m gonna get some candles. Make yourself at home or whatever.”

The last part of her comment should irk him, but he’s too busy being confused because she moves like she knows exactly where she’s going, like she’s been here many times before. When he turns to his left, he can see why. Unlike the last time he was confronted with a wall full of photographs, he doesn’t feel like he’s staring at strangers now because there’s Michelle on her last day of middle school, hiding a grin behind the board of her blue graduation cap. 

There she is at the beach, curled up on a sun lounger and completely engrossed in ‘As Brave As You’. There she is as a kid mixing finger paint. There she is playing cello in front of a Christmas tree. There she is on New Year’s Eve, saluting the camera with a lop-sided smirk and fireworks going off in the background. There she is, arm in arm with a man who has her eyes, her nose, and her smile. He looks like he’s in his late 20’s and Peter spots him on other photographs as well. Sometimes alone, sometimes with her, sometimes with a tall blonde guy who seems to have a penchant for indie band shirts and colourful tattoos that look like they’re a mix of street art and quirky comic book doodles. They’re always together, the three of them, smiling down at him from where they’re clipped to a grid made of yarn.

They’re a family, he thinks, just like he and May are.

Judging by the muffled clatter that’s coming from the far end of the hallway, she’s still looking for candles and while a part of him knows that he should either wait or go and help her, another part of him wants to take the opportunity and see if there’s more: more photographs, more details, more glimpses into her life and the people that have a place in it. He’s disgusted with himself when he starts to wander around, finds himself in her room, and _doesn’t_ walk out immediately.

“This is so wrong,” he whispers to himself, feeling like a fucking creep as his eyes bounce from one corner to the next.

She really owns a lot of books. Like, books are abundant in this room. They’re crammed into shelves, stacked on the floor, and lined up on the windowsill along with a variation of cacti and miniature succulents. They’re literally everywhere and it’s pretty clear that she doesn’t restrict herself to a certain genre or major form. There’s a reader of Romantic poetry wedged between ‘Macbeth’, ‘The Female Eunuch’, and the Artemis Fowl series. There’s Hermann Hesse, Toni Morrison, and F. Sionil Jose sitting atop ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’ and ‘A Man of the People’. There’s romance and science-fiction, fairy tales and French dictionaries, essay collections on politics and feminism, and art books ranging from Frida Kahlo to Jan Vermeer.

And there _is_ more.

So much more he didn’t know.

For example, he didn’t know that she had a thing for fairy lights and incense sticks, or that the wall next to her bed was covered by a huge Grace Jones poster. He didn’t know that she kept her pencils in coffee mugs, her art supplies in vegetable crates, and her protest signs propped up against the thermostat. He didn’t know that her cello case had its place in a corner next to her closet, and he didn’t know that the way she arranged a couple of birthday cards on her desk could strike him as utterly endearing – except that the feeling doesn’t last long when the terror sneaks back in to make his skin crawl because the numbers on the cards suggest that she lived long enough to celebrate her 21st birthday, which is ridiculous, of course. _Of course._ He picks up the one that has a purple ‘18’ printed on the front, and the lump in his throat starts to squirm when he opens the card and begins to read.  


_Dear Chelle,_

_it’s been 375 days since you disappeared. Today, you would’ve turned 18, so cheers to you, birthday girl! Zach and I are gonna go to the sculpture park today because it’s your favourite place in the city. We’re gonna have a little picnic there, eat some birthday cake, and we’re probably gonna cry a lot._

_Things are getting better. The riots have stopped a while ago and now that he’s back, Stark is pumping all his warmonger money into charity and reconstruction. We still don’t know what we’re supposed to do with your room, but I don’t think I can give all your stuff away. At least not yet. (I know. It’s just stuff, but it’s **your** stuff and it took us so long to get it all back, so give me a little more time, okay?)_

_Anyway, I’m getting sentimental and I know how much you hate that. I just want you to know that Zach and I are doing well. But we miss you, Chelle._

_We miss you so much._

_Love, T._

_P.S.: Remember that photo we took when you moved in? Zach found it in a box under our bed. It’s a birthday gift. He thought you might like it._  


As if on cue, he turns the card and finds a polaroid attached to the back of it. He sucks in a wet, shuddering breath. It’s a group shot, slightly blurred and a little crinkled, but it’s them: a young Michelle with pigtails and braces and the two men from the photographs in the hallway. They’re right here in her room, a golden paper garland saying ‘Welcome Home’ glittering above their heads. They’re making silly faces and they look so happy. He puts the card back on the table, the blood in his veins wild with shame, blame, and perfect contrition because what the hell was he thinking? He wasn’t supposed to see this! It’s private, intimate – just like everything else in this room – and he’s about to turn and leave when he finds her leaning against the doorframe with an unreadable expression on her face and her fingers curled around a pack of tea lights and a box of matches.

“Um.”

“Way to invade my privacy, loser.”

She doesn’t sound offended. If anything, she sounds like she’s proud of herself for catching him red-handed. He drags a hand over his face as if to wipe away the heat that’s boiling beneath his skin.

“I wasn’t – I didn’t mean to – I’m so sorry, MJ, please don’t be ma –”

She scoffs, puts the candles and the matches on her bed, and then she smiles at him in a way that would make his belly flutter if it weren’t for the dread that’s already taken up all the space there.

“I’m messing with you. I’d be curious, too, if it were the other way around,” she says dismissively, but then her gaze slips to the cards and her smile fades away and morphs into a frown, “What’s that?”

“N-Nothing.”

Maybe it’s the trepidation in his voice or his poor attempt at shielding the cards from her view with his body that makes her push past him like it’s the easiest thing in the world – because it shouldn’t be, because he _could_ make it difficult for her. He _could_ use his super strength to prevent her from getting her hands on the cards, but he doesn’t because it wouldn’t be fair to keep this from her. As much as he wants to spare her the pain, doing so would make him a terrible friend, so he lingers at her side, bracing himself for the impact.

The tears.

The rage.

The heartbreak.

He’s pre-fabricating apologies already, sweet, empty promises that they’re going to find another place to stay and that things will get better because he’s going to make them better somehow, when she surprises him once again.

“Okay, cool,” she says, unblinking as she drops the last card, and there’s a flare of grief in her eyes, so raw and palpable, so eager to get the point across despite her efforts to conceal it.

She stomps back to the bed and picks up the pack of candles, tearing at the wrapping and cursing under her breath. He watches her, tells himself not to intervene because this is what she needs right now: no words and no comfort. But the sight of her – the sight of her taking out her anger on something that just won’t break no matter how hard she tries strangles his throat.

“MJ!”

Her name leaves him in a plea and it startles them both. It’s too drenched in emotion for him to pass it off as a simple means to claim her attention, and her grief expands like a dying star, lighting up her eyes until they’re bright with tears. Whatever it was that was about to jump from his lips, whatever it was he was about to say to her dies on the tip of his tongue as he comes to stand beside her.

“Let me,” he croaks, prying her fingers off the package. He gives the wrapping a gentle tug. The candles come loose in a matter of seconds, and so do her tears and the salt that binds them.

.

.

.

Night has found them and they’re lying in her bed, facing each other with the sheets pulled up to their waists and about six inches between them. For some reason, her proximity doesn’t turn him into a jittery klutz this time, and he’s grateful for that because it gives him the opportunity to _listen_.

“My brother took me in when I was twelve,” she says, the candles making it so that her features are cast in a dozen dancing shadows, “He’s my legal guardian because our mother – she’s, um – she’s not very stable.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

She pulls a face and he knows she’s not doing it because she’s ashamed or embarrassed. It’s her go-to method for whenever she’s at risk of letting her guard down. He might’ve seen her doing it before. Still, he can’t remember whether he had to talk her into talking to him or not, and he can’t think of a single reason as to why it should matter because he’s already wrapped up in her story, already engaged in watching her peel off the layers.

There’s a moment during all of this when he’s consumed by the urge to touch her, and it’s not when she’s telling him about the tragedies that shaped her childhood. It’s not when she’s telling him that her father died a few months after she was born and that her mother never really recovered from the loss. It’s not when she’s telling him that eventually, her mother became more of a roommate: always busy, always somewhere, always ecstatic or in the depths of despair. No, no. It’s when she’s telling him about how happy she was on that first morning after she’d moved in with her brother and his boyfriend that a stray strand of hair falls into her face and cuts through her tremulous smile. It’s right then when his fingers start to itch, right then when he wants to reach out and tuck the curl behind her ear so badly that he’s almost surprised at himself for chickening out last-minute.

“Are you still in touch with your mother?” he asks instead.

Her jaw tightens a bit.

“Not really. Last time we spoke was after D.C. She was supposed to pick me up from the bus station because Terry had to pull a night shift and Zach was in Jacksonville for his great-uncle’s funeral. They didn’t _want_ to ask her, but they didn’t really have a choice,” she pauses and picks at the mattress cover, “She called me the day before and told me we were gonna have dinner at her place. I was kinda looking forward to it because we hadn’t seen each other in months, but she didn’t show up.”

“How did you get back home?”

“I took a walk.”

She rolls onto her back, puts her hands on her stomach, and stares at the ceiling – and he stares at _her_ because he remembers how she stuck out like a sore thumb that night, clutching her duffle bag to her chest and pretending to look anything but disappointed while everyone else was being greeted by their parents with hugs and smiles and kisses to their cheeks and foreheads. He also remembers May asking her if she needed a ride and Michelle declining the offer by mumbling something along the lines of how her mother was going to be there any minute. It was a lie – obviously – and even though he couldn’t have known back then, he feels like he should make amends for having let her get away with it so easily.

“I’m sorry,” she says while he’s still struggling to find the right words, “For dragging you to your place. I didn’t want to make you sad.”

“It’s okay.”

“You need to stop doing that.”

“Stop doing what?”

She turns her head in his direction, her lips set into an unhappy line.

“Telling me that it’s okay when it’s not. I made a mistake and you called me out on it in a very lame, very loser-y way that wasn’t half as clever or funny as you think it was –”

“ _Hey –_ ”

“But I liked it,” she shifts her weight until they’re face to face again, “And I don’t want you to take it back just because I apologised.”

He gapes at her. The flutter is back and it feels like they’re having a moment again. And maybe he should get his shit together and actually do something about it this time because who knows if he’ll get another chance? Who knows if they’ll ever have another moment once they’re back home or at least, not here anymore? He licks his lips, almost chokes on his nerves. He can do this.

“Michelle –”

“MJ.”

“Huh?”

“You can call me MJ. Actually, you’ve already called me MJ three times today, and I’m fine with it,” she says, “W-We’re friends now.”

He huffs out a laugh and his heart constricts in the most beautiful way. Nothing in this world was designed to bring him joy, but this – this is something he didn’t know he wanted, didn’t know he needed until she gave it to him.

“Awesome.”

She rolls her eyes at him. And then, before he can blush or breathe or think, she cups his cheek and kills the space between them – and as soft and tentative as it may be, the kiss sends a shock to his system. Within seconds, his mind goes from blank to autopilot, screaming at him to reciprocate, and he assumes that perhaps a different version of him – _Other Peter_ , who’s bold and assertive and feels comfortable in his own skin – would pull her closer and kiss her back with confidence.

Yeah.

Other Peter wouldn’t trail the back of her hand with nervous, metal-clad fingers. He wouldn’t gasp and quiver with emotions he can’t quite comprehend, wouldn’t shuffle around awkwardly in his search for a better angle and bump her nose with his by accident. Other Peter wouldn’t have to worry about his lack of skill because Other Peter would know what he’s doing. Other Peter wouldn’t let on that this is the first time he’s kissing _anyone_ , but Other Peter wouldn’t get to enjoy the outcome either. He wouldn’t get to make her draw back and snort. He wouldn’t get to admire her dimples or the spark in her eyes. Other Peter, with all his pride and fervour, wouldn’t try to make up for his blunder with yet another clumsy kiss, and he wouldn’t end up laughing with her.

“You’re a mess,” she sighs.

Their foreheads touch and he decides that this is crazy – crazy good, of course, but also crazy in general. After all, today was a fucking nightmare and Michelle Jones just _kissed_ him and _he_ kissed _her_ and he’d really like to do it again.

“You’re not,” he mumbles, punch-drunk from the sensation of her lips against his, “A mess, I mean.”

A chuckle topples from her tongue and the sound of it makes him want to fucking _purr_. He can’t stop grinning at her because she doesn’t mind that he’s a mess. Because she said that they’re friends now and because her nose looks kinda cute when it’s crinkled like that and _oh hey_ , they’re kissing again. He slides his hand down to the crook of her elbow, tightens his grip, and makes a pathetic noise when she grabs his chin to guide him. She tastes like tea and bubble-gum, and it’s like he’s lost all control over his mouth when he says: “You really good at this.”

“I know.”

“You’re good at everything.”

“Duh.”

The amusement in her voice is hard to miss and he can’t remember the last time he’s felt this calm. Maybe this is what being on drugs feels like. Maybe she’s trying to sedate him. Maybe it’s okay if they don’t come up with a solid plan right now because maybe it’s okay if they take a break. Maybe they’ll go to the bridge tomorrow and find answers, maybe they won’t. Maybe he should stop worrying about that, at least for a while. He looks at MJ for what might be the 50th time since they got here, and he wants to tell her everything.

He wants to tell her that he chipped his left front tooth when he was eight years old and fell from his bike. He wants to tell her that he wrote a really crappy poem when he was crushing on Gwen Stacy in elementary school. He wants to tell her that he’d never set a foot outside New York until Mr Stark flew him to Germany, and he wants to tell her that he didn’t get to see much of the country while he was there. He wants to tell her that he’s watched ‘A New Hope’ 20 times by now and that his favourite moment in the movie is when Obi-Wan gives Luke the lightsaber after they fought from the Tusken raiders. He wants to tell her that he prefers ‘The Lord of the Rings’ over ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ because it’s more inspiring to him. He wants to tell her that his nerdiness revolves more around TV shows and graphic novels while playing online fantasy games is actually Ned’s area of expertise.

He wants to tell her about the parents he never met and the parents he chose. He wants to tell her about Ben and his dorky sense of humour, and how he had to watch him bleed out on the street because he was just a 13-year-old boy back then, still months away from being bit by a radioactive spider. He wants to tell her about May and how she’s always been like a mother to him. How thanks to her, he’s the only superhero in the world who’s on dishwashing duty and a curfew. He wants to tell her that his anxiety has gone through the roof since he beat the Vulture, and that sometimes, he dreams of being a normal kid again. By the time he’s done, the candles have burned out and he can barely hold his eyes open. A yawn escapes him while MJ cards her hand through his hair.

“You know, I was only 49 per cent sure that you’re Spider-Man.”

“That’s not much, statistically speaking.”

“Well, you _are_ clumsy,” she says, “And Spider-Man – he’s kinda cool, which you are _not_.”

“Thank you.”

It’s her turn to yawn, causing his cheeks to swell with affection, and he hopes that she can see it in the dark, the way he’s smiling at her right now. Chances are pretty good that he looks like an idiot, but he doesn’t really care. Her eyes flutter shut and he joins her. It’s strange how they went from acquaintances who barely talked to each other at school to friends (who kiss!) in the span of a couple of hours – or years, depending on how you look at it. It’s strange and illogical, but he doesn’t want to ruin it by asking too many questions, so he holds her instead, one hand trapped between her waist and the mattress and the other pressed against the dip of her spine. He falls asleep to her soft snores, oddly happy about how the day came to an end.

Outside, the wind swirls up a sound: faint at first, but grumbling all the same. It’s the low base of waves and thunder, similar to the sound of the storm that started it all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welp. it's been 84 years, but i hope it was worth the wait. as always, comments and kudos are appreciated.
> 
> stay safe and see you next time <3
> 
> .
> 
> .
> 
> .
> 
> p.s.: fun fact! the chapter was initially titled 'mtv cribs: spideychelle edition' because in case you didn't know: i'm a fucking comedian.


	6. lightning

_You’re all right._

They were never supposed to make it to the bridge. They were never supposed to end up anywhere but here, where summer storms and the dirge of the lake abuse each other relentlessly. Just like last time, the sky is a flame-red dome, cluttered with gashes and abrasions that gleam and glimmer in hues of beetroot and coal. Just like last time, the wind tastes like salt, and the waves are restless, humming and murmuring as they sweep over plains of pale brown sand.

_You’re all right._

The tingle in his limbs is an integral part of what it’s like to disappear completely. It’s a slow process and somewhat familiar. If there was a lesson to learn from all of this, he must’ve been deaf and blind to it, too intent on preserving hope to realise that hope was never meant to prevail. It was never meant to stick with him. It was meant to leave him, bit by bit and clue by clue, but his stubbornness made him cling to hope even harder.

_You’re all right._

MJ’s hair is dancing in the wind. The tips have started to disintegrate and she’s paler than usual, but she doesn’t seem scared. She’s standing next to him with her head held high, her eyes fixed on the horizon, and her hand wrapped around his. She might be the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

“I wanted to kiss you at Homecoming,” she says, out of the blue as they watch the sky grow darker by the minute. His response skitters out of him in a stutter.

“W-Why?”

She turns her head and meets his gaze.

“You’re a good guy. I’ve always liked that about you.”

There’s a level of sincerity in the way she’s speaking to him now that tugs at his lower belly and fills it with embers. Suddenly, tuning out the terror is the easiest thing in the world, though he can’t say the same for the ruckus in his chest. His heart’s in a bind, dithering between skipping beats and pounding away at double speed, and his tongue is working against him.

“B-But you didn’t – you never,” he stammers, “You – you just – you flipped me off! How was I supposed to know that you – ”

“You weren’t supposed to know anything, dork. You were nuts about Liz and for some reason, I kinda enjoyed being rude to you,” she counters, sounding like she’s just stating facts, which he knows is exactly what she’s doing, “There was no chance that you would’ve liked me back then.”

He can’t decide if he’s amazed or intimidated by her straightforwardness. She doesn’t seem to have any difficulties putting her thoughts and feelings into words, and when she’s done, she has the audacity to smile at him.

His blush comes unbidden.

Upon waking, all he could see was her. Her face (tucked into his shoulder), her chest (expanding and collapsing with every breath she took, going like clockwork), and her mouth (slack and soft and _right there_ ). He was frozen in place, terrified of rousing her from what had looked like a peaceful slumber. Recognising their surroundings took him longer than he’d like to admit, but in the end, he did recognise the place. He had to. He had to look around and recognise the lake, the dune, the big red nothing. He thinks about what she just told him and peers down at their hands. As much as he wants to tell her that he hadn’t been as oblivious to her feelings as she claims he’d been, his mind just cannot come up with a valuable response because she’s right. She never gave him a reason to consider that she might like him and none of that really changed until this place forced them to rely on each other.

But now? Now he got to kiss her, talk to her, and fall asleep with her hair tickling his chin and nose, and he has no doubt that no one, not even Liz, has ever made him feel this way. And he doesn’t want to lose this. He wants to hold on to this feeling, this giddy excess energy that makes his whole body vibrate whenever she’s near him. He wants to keep it, wants to conserve it like a botanist would want to conserve a rare plant specimen and put it into a herbarium.

“I like you now,” he blurts out, “Like, a lot.”

“I know,” she says, “That’s why I kissed you last night.”

She makes it sound so simple, like she knew that it was going to happen eventually. He cocks his head to the side.

“So, you were waiting for me?” he asks, a breathy laugh bubbling in his throat, aching to get out and be free.

Her smile spills over into a smirk.

“Kind of.”

He can’t stop it, the laugh. It’s out there, echoing between them, and he softens at her confession. It’s such an MJ to do, he thinks. To sit back and confuse the hell out of him while he’s taking his sweet time to get with the programme. It’s what’s going to make him fall for her completely one day: her patience with him and her refusal to treat him like he’s special just because she cares about him. And she’s always been like that. Take AcaDec for example. Every time he showed up late for practice she stared him down and read him the riot act. She never passed up the opportunity to humiliate him in front of the entire team and he never wasted a single thought on fighting back, knowing full well that she had every right to call him out for being a flake.

His mouth goes dry.

If he’d kissed her then, would she have let him? Probably not. She would’ve ripped him a new one and told him to get a grip. She would’ve made it perfectly clear to him that she had no time for his bullshit because their competition against Herricks High was just around the corner and she needed them all to be at the top of their game. Again, he sneaks a glance at their hands. They’re almost translucent now.

“I’m glad you’re here with me,” he says, and she squeezes his fingers like she’s done so many times before. He knows that it’s more than just comfort. It’s trust and friendship and affinity and, possibly, the kind of love that inspires him when he’s seconds away from losing it all.

The rumble roars above them, proclaiming its victory, and the first pair of clouds plunges into the water. The impact stirs the lake and the waves are coming faster now, lapping at their feet. He folds his arms around her because no matter what they’re going to do – no matter if they’re going to run away or towards it, no matter if they’re going to sleep through it or face it with their eyes wide open – the rumble will find them. It will find them and take them away from here.

She gasps and brings her palm to the back of his neck when a flash of light breaks through the dark and sets the sky on fire. It’s what a rainbow would look like if you cross-bred it with lightning: a jagged blend of blue, red, purple, orange, yellow, and green, crackling with pent-up electricity, smashing clouds into shards and turning them into fluffs of ash that dance around them like black snowflakes. It’s as beautiful as it is haunting. He can’t bring himself to look away.

_I don’t wanna go._

“I’m sorry, MJ.”

His voice is thick and his legs start to shake.

_Please._

“You don’t have to be.”

_I don’t –_

He takes a moment to focus on nothing but the sound of her heartbeat. He was so desperate to leave when they first got here, so desperate to wake up with no memory of this place, but now things have changed dramatically. The rumble is louder than ever and the waves keep wailing. They’re about to fall to pieces and he wants to _remember_ this. He wants to remember that he held her in a hypercoloured thunderstorm. That he was all right when everything around him sunk into chaos, and that he was all right because of her.

“MJ.”

_You’re all right._

“Yeah?”

“I think, I – I want you to know that I,” he chokes up, drops one hand down to her waist, and screws his eyes shut, “I just wish we had more time.”

_You’re all right._

She strokes his scalp with fading fingers.

_You’re all right._

“Me, too.”

A smile she’ll never get to see finds shelter in the crook of her neck and he wonders if he won after all. If the actual lesson was to walk through hell and return to the starting point, still clinging and still hoping. Because that’s what he’s doing. He’s still clinging to her, still hoping that he’s going to remember what being close to her felt like when the wind knocks them down and turns them into dust.

.

.

.

He spends most of his summer in a loop. On a good night, he’s on patrol, swinging from rooftop to rooftop and savouring the sticky air as it whips past his ears. On a bad night, he’s also on patrol, longing for something as mundane as a fistfight to distract himself while he’s perched on the edge of a rail bridge with a heavy heart and a splitting headache. His mind is a blasted ruin, caught in a constant struggle to make sense of the new normal. He doesn’t remember much except for the roar of the battle and the silence that followed their victory. How he couldn’t stop rambling as Tony’s pulse dwindled away, and how he wept when he was reunited with May at one of the makeshift ‘returnee camps’ near LaGuardia. The moments in between are kind of a blur.

Around August, they move into their new apartment. It’s smaller than the old one, but it’s closer to May’s new workplace, so that’s good. They don’t have to go and buy new furniture because on their moving day, Happy arrives in a huge van that’s loaded with their stuff: their couch, their bookshelves, their photo albums, and their Christmas decorations. May’s dreamcatchers, his action figures and dumb t-shirts – hell, even Ben’s suitcase. It’s all there in that van, looking as good as new. He can’t believe that Tony kept their belongings for them, but then he thinks about it, thinks about Tony, and the idea doesn’t seem so far-fetched anymore. He wipes his nose with his sleeve and holds May’s hand as she whispers words of gratitude into the clear blue sky.

He’s been running on fumes since the funeral. He eats and sleeps because he has to. He’s anxious to go back to school because he knows that doing homework and cramming for tests will be mind-numbingly boring compared to what went down at the compound. His nightmares are tame, but he’s never really awake these days, he’s never really here. He’s moving in a trance with one foot set in the present and the other stuck in a dreamscape where clouds made of stone descend upon dark beaches. He knows that the place isn’t real, but sometimes, he wonders if it could be.

May wants him to hang out with Ned to compensate for his nightly superhero gigs. She doesn’t like that he’s already out there again, that he doesn’t take more time to lick his wounds, but she knows that she can’t stop him. Still, he can feel guilt ripping through his stomach every time he slips into his suit. It’s heavy and indigestible. It doesn’t change the fact that he needs to be out there, though. It doesn’t change the fact that not being out there makes him antsy and irritable.

“This school year’s gonna be _so_ weird,” Ned whines one evening when they assemble Legos and binge-watch ‘Gravity Falls’ at the Leeds’s place. With September and the prospect of boredom lingering at the door step, Peter likes to think that he feels a little less out of place than he did a month ago. He likes to think that’s a good sign, “Like, we’re gonna go to class with eleven-year-olds! I mean, I know they not eleven years old anymore, but still. It’s weird, right?”

“Right.”

He shoves a handful of Bugles into his mouth. They must’ve talked about this a million times by now and he’s getting tired of being told how weird things have become. Housing, school, applying for a new ID card – it’s all fucking weird thanks to the Blip, and even though he knows Ned would never blame him or the Avengers for what happened, Peter blames himself every day. He blames himself because his classmates managed to escape the school bus by the time he arrived on Titan only to turn to ashes in the comfort of their homes and, in some cases, right in front of their loved ones. He blames himself because Mrs Leeds comes to check on her son every day at 8 am before she goes to work. He blames himself because last time she didn’t check on her son was when he disappeared. He blames himself because for many parents checking on their kids in the morning has stopped being part of a loving routine. It’s compulsive now, fuelled by half a decade of grief and loneliness.

He shifts his attention back to their project. They’re building an Imperial Star Destroyer today and he’s supposed to construct the communications tower, but all he does is fiddle with the plastic bricks until the sound of the TV becomes too much and Ned says his name, tells him to stop, and he realises that he just disassembled about a third of what he’s been working on for the past thirty minutes. He stops in his tracks, looks at his hands, and then at his best friend.

“Are you all right, Peter?”

He really fucking hates that question. It makes him want to lie down and curl up into a ball. It makes him want to jump and flee the scene like a criminal. It makes his tongue loose and his insides churn. He exhales an unsteady breath.

“We almost had him, you know,” he says, and it’s hard to work his mouth around a truth that’s so painful, “We could’ve – we could’ve stopped him on Titan, but it all went wrong and he – he was – we couldn’t get it done – we – we couldn’t beat him.”

Ned’s expression is terribly sympathetic.

“It’s okay.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“It is. You guys saved the world. Doesn’t matter if you did it on second try. You brought us all back home.”

He can’t say why the words hit him in all the wrong places. Maybe it’s because the Snap turned the world into a disaster zone, torn and ravaged and scattered with soot. Because so many people died during the riots and the lootings. Because the Blip saw some people pop up in the middle of a highway or a train track or the fucking ocean. He grits his teeth until his jaw starts to sting. Ned is wrong. They didn’t bring _everyone_ back home. They made a mistake the first time around and paid a hard price when they had the chance to undo it. Pepper, Morgan, Wanda, and Clint, with their red-rimmed eyes and broken hearts, are the living proof of that.

He blinks.

_You need to stop doing that._

_Stop doing what?_

_Telling me that it’s okay when it’s not._

His head is full of white noise, full of dark curls and tight-lipped smiles, full of rainbows and lightning and the clap of thunder. How is he supposed to go back to school in two weeks when he can’t even concentrate on a Lego set? How is he supposed to move on when he feels like he lost something important? How is he supposed to do _anything_ when he’s so fucking sad and tired all the time?

He tells Ned that he’s late for patrol, and he doesn’t recognise his own voice. Ned understands because of course he does. Unlike May, he isn’t worried at all. He’s excited, or maybe he’s just good at hiding his concern. It doesn’t really matter when Peter’s finally out there again, his senses taking over to guide him through the night.

.

.

.

He doesn’t plan on visiting her that night. He doesn’t even know where she lives, but he finds her anyway. It’s a lucky coincidence and it changes everything. Not immediately, of course, but by degrees.

He saves a pregnant woman from being harassed by a group of drunk frat boys in a blind alley. He tries to talk to them, but they don’t listen. They tell him about what they’re going to do to her once they’re done with him, so he beats the shit out of them and webs to the brick wall. They keep yelling at him. He pulls the woman out of the alley. His breathing is ragged, his knuckles hurt, and he’s fucking furious. Karen informs him that the police are on their way. He can hear the sirens go off in the distance.

“Thank you,” the woman gasps, already coming down from the initial shock. She has her hands splayed over her swollen belly and he thinks about what would’ve happened to her if he hadn’t made it in time. He looks back into the alley, bites down a snarl, “It’s good to see you, Spidey.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that. She’s taller than him. She’s wearing pink ballet flats and a Trader Joe’s uniform, and her hair is pulled into a ponytail. Her eyeliner is a bit smudged, but otherwise she’s unharmed – and that’s what matters. He offers to walk her home, but she tells him she’d rather wait for the police.

“Gotta make sure they take these pricks into custody,” she explains whilst poking at her phone.

“You want me to stay and wait with you?”

“Nah, I’m good. My boyfriend’s gonna be here soon. He’s a boxing coach,” she winks at him and holds out her free hand; he takes it lightly, “I’m Pinar, by the way. If you tell me your name, maybe I’m gonna name my baby after you.”

“What if it’s a girl?”

“I don’t believe in gender norms.”

He snorts and shakes his head. He knows someone who’d give him a similar answer, albeit in a considerably drier tone.

“You’re funny, Pinar.”

She smiles at him and then he’s off, zig-zagging along Northern Boulevard and up to 34th Avenue until he comes across a tiny doughnut shop where he makes the cashier’s night when he buys himself a cruller and a coffee to-go. It’s not a healthy late night snack, but it’s not like his metabolism can’t take it. He knows that May would roll her eyes at him if she could see him right now. Fortunately, though, she’s out for drinks with her new colleagues and he’s happy about that. He’s happy for her because she deserves at least one night in her life where she isn’t worried sick about him.

He finds a rooftop that isn’t covered in pigeon shit and lets his legs dangle off the edge while he devours the pastry in two bites. The coffee’s still too hot to be chugged down, so he pulls his mask over his chin again and lets his gaze roam the row of brownstones on the other side of the street. It’s close to midnight and there isn’t much to see except for a few windows that are illuminated by flickering TVs. An old couple, a young couple, a lot of single people, and a little girl who should’ve gone to bed hours ago. He folds his hands in his lap.

So, five years and everything is the same except that it isn’t. Tony’s face graces walls and magazine covers across the globe. The Avengers are back and they’re shattered. Some families are whole again while others remain broken. Hearts have been stumped on, memorials have been erected, and there are people out there who prey on pregnant women. The big bad guy is gone and thousands take to the streets to protest in his name because apparently, everything was better when half of the universe didn’t exist. The Children of Thanos. What a fucking joke.

He sighs.

He’s not the same either. _He’s never really here_. He’s dreaming of seaweed, birch trees, and empty hallways. And he lost something. He knows it. He can feel it in his bones, in the back of his head. He can feel it when he’s thinking about school, when he’s trying to sleep, when he’s rubbing his fingers against the fabric of his very first Spider-Man suit. He can feel it everywhere, he can feel it right now. He can feel it when a window on the third floor lights up and presents a tall figure, slender and half-swallowed by an oversized Nike t-shirt. Her hair is wet and there’s a towel slung over her shoulders. She looks exhausted, but also kind of nice.

He can’t remember the last time he saw Michelle. It must’ve been on the bus, right before all hell broke loose, and he can’t explain why he’s so relieved to see her _now_. If anything, seeing her should add to his guilt because she didn’t survive the Snap either. Ned told him as much when he filled him in, but hearing about the people he failed is very different from watching them while they have no idea that they’re being watched. It’s creepy and totally not his style, so he should stop. He should grab his coffee, find another roof to sit on, and let her tend to her plants – are those cacti on her windowsill? – in peace.

But he doesn’t.

He watches her tend to her plants and tries not to think too much about how watching her tend to her plants makes him feel. He tries not to think too much about how cosy her room looks. It’s all bookshelves and art supplies, and he lets out a chuckle when he recalls all those hours she used to spent in detention to sketch people – and oftentimes, him – in crisis. Maybe he’s going to be her muse again this year and maybe she’s going to be captain again, too. She was ruthless and brilliant and dedicated. A force to be reckoned with and so demanding. He can’t really see anyone else doing the job, be it a member of their old team or someone new.

So, he watches.

He watches and watches and then his eyes go wide because there she is, standing at her window, watching _him_. He flails, knocks over his cup of coffee, and _shit shit shit_ , what is he supposed to do now? His heart starts to beat really fast, prompting Karen to chime in and ask him if he’s okay, but he can’t answer her. He can’t do anything but hold Michelle’s gaze and hope that she’ll be the first to look away.

_You were all over YouTube. Kinda looked like you were running around and doing backflips in your PJs._

His breath catches in his throat. Does she know? Does she know it’s him? She can’t, right? He never told her and she probably wouldn’t believe him if he did. She thinks he’s a loser – a clumsy one at that. She doesn’t know, so there’s no reason for him to panic. Chances are she’s just surprised (or annoyed) that Spider-Man is hanging around in her neighbourhood. But she’s smart, she’s observant. She _could_ know.

_What gave me away?_

_Your height, your posture. The way you disguised your voice to sound all manly and the fact that you called me_ Ma’am.

With a gasp, he grabs the edge of the roof like it’s the only thing that’s keeping him from slumping forward and tumbling to the ground. His head is spinning with fractions of a dream that is all too familiar. Snow, salt, dust, and cardboard tombstones, soft kisses and conversations he’s never had – it all comes crashing down on him and it doesn’t make any goddamn sense.

_It’s okay._

_No, it’s not._

He can’t breathe, can’t take his eyes off her when her frown is replaced by a brief twitch of her lips. She holds up her hand and waves at him and suddenly, he feels like fifty pounds have been lifted off his shoulder.

_I like you now. Like, a lot._

He mirrors her smile beneath his mask.

 _It’s good to see you_ , is what he wants to tell her, but he knows she wouldn’t hear him over the buzz of the street that’s stretched out between them. He knows she wouldn’t hear him over the sound of New York City being its usual noisy self, so he raises his hand in kind and waves back with his heart still racing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so, yeah. that happened.
> 
> here's the thing: the story was always supposed to go this way, but i can imagine that some of you were hoping for something different/less vague or depressing. with that being said: feel free to bring the rage in the comments.
> 
> there's going to be one more chapter and then we're (finally) done.
> 
> stay safe and see you next time!


	7. riptide

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **SOMEWHAT IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT**
> 
> i’m a certified idiot. as soon as i finished this chapter (again, sorry for the delay... writer's block is a bitch), i realised that i totally forgot about the epilogue. so, if we’re talking about chapter counts, this is the penultimate chapter and i will post one more (smaller) chapter in the near future to wrap this thing up. hope you’re okay with that.

He has a mini panic attack in Economics when he looks out of the window and finds a huge slab of marble in the middle of the courtyard, featuring the names of all the students and teachers who were dusted five years ago. His breathing becomes a little too shallow and his vision gets all blurry and tunnel-like, so he tries to focus on Mrs Nam as she rattles off the syllabus at lightning speed. He tries to think about something good or nice or funny, tries to count everything in the classroom that is either blue or yellow, tries not to lose his grip on reality when his mind starts playing tricks on him.

_This – this can’t be real, right?_

_Well, it_ looks _pretty real to me, Peter._

Turns out Ned was only partly right about going back to school. Because it _is_ weird, yes, but it’s also _nerve-wracking_ in the way that he almost sobs in relief when the school bell puts him out of his misery, prompting him to leave the classroom in a hurry, the rustle of papers and someone calling after him flying right over his head. It’s nerve-wracking in the way that the hallway starts to tilt to the right and that he bumps into a least five different people on his way out. He apologises profusely, chokes out the words like he’s being strangled by an invisible force. He doesn’t know where Ned is and Jesus fucking Christ, this isn’t how he anticipated the first day of his (second) junior year to go. He thought it was going to be uneventful. He thought it was going to be conveniently boring, but the sad truth is: boring isn’t convenient at all. Boring is just boring, and it doesn’t gloss over the fact that the Blip fucked with his brain too much.

_We’re not dead._

_Peter –_

_No, we’re – w-we’re_ here _and – a-and –_

He gets washed up near the parking lot and screws his eyes shut in a fruitless attempt to fend off the harbingers of a splitting headache while his heartbeat slams against his throat. He’s a mess. He’s an open wound, a solar flare, a category 5 hurricane. He’s a crash site trapped in a human body and his jaw is locked into place, clenched to the point where his teeth might crack from the pressure. He thinks about Pinar, the pregnant woman he saved back in August, and he wants to scream. He thinks about the slab of marble in the courtyard, about how having your name engraved on a giant tombstone when you’re alive and (relatively) well is actually fucking disturbing, and he wants to puke. He thinks about May and the things he can’t tell her because he can’t drag her down, and he wants to cry.

He doesn’t, though. Ned finds him and just like that, the concept of time and space reconquers doesn’t seem so foreign anymore. Just like that, he’s having lunch with his best friend, dragging his fork through the colourless serve of _something_ on his plate. According to the menu, today’s special is bone-dry roasted chicken with runny mashed potatoes and the type of vanilla pudding that gives you caries and diabetes if you look at it for too long. There’s no need to complain. Even after five years, the food at Midtown is still the culinary equivalent of a stress test. It’s good news considering that everything else has changed in such a drastic, vertigo-inducing manner.

The tables in the cafeteria are round now. It probably wasn’t a big deal before summer break, but now that everyone’s back, now that there are twice as many students as there used to be in the past five years, it’s the biggest fucking deal. Like, the pecking order is gone and no one knows where to sit or who to sit with. It’s like musical chairs, except that the chairs are covered in fluoroantimonic acid and the victory prize is a kick in the stomach. Funnily enough, Peter and Ned don’t have to worry about that. Their massive loser vibes are perfectly intact, so they get at a table of their own (even though there’s a moment of suspense when Flash passes them and looks as if he’s going to join them before he moves on to sit with a bunch of goth kids who glare at him like they want him to combust on the spot).

Despite all the post-Blip awkwardness that seems to linger in every corner of the entire damn school building, the memorial is the one thing everybody is talking about, and for a second, Peter is relieved because if other people are talking about the memorial, there’s a high chance that it actually _exists_. If other people have seen it down in the courtyard, there’s a high chance that he hasn’t gone insane yet.

“I saw it on my way to Latin. Couldn’t concentrate in class even if I wanted to. It’s creepy, man,” Ned tell him whilst unwrapping the straw of his juice box, “But I heard that the student council’s gonna work out a plan to have it removed before Homecoming.”

“That’s good,” he says, although he can’t imagine that the members of the student council, despite their readiness to step into the breach for the benefit of all, will be able to achieve anything here. Getting rid of the memorial will cost a lot of money, so the ‘whens’ and ‘hows’ and ‘who’s-gonna-pay-for-thats’ will probably remain open to debate for the _next_ five years.

With a huff, he begins to methodically cut his food and makes an effort to stay in the present as Ned tells him about a cute girl in his Latin class. Peter doesn’t say much, but he’s thankful for the change of subject, he’s thankful that his best friend is the type of person that just knows when to let things go.

“Have you caught any bad guys lately?”

He cringes. Not because he doesn’t want to talk about Spider-Man stuff, but because he kinda already knows what’s going to happen next. Lifting his shoulders into a shrug and feigning equanimity, he prepares himself for the inevitable.

“I’m still investigating the Ficek syndicate.”

As expected, Ned lets out a disbelieving guffaw.

Goddammit.

“Since when is it your job to _investigate_ people?”

He scowls and shoves a forkful of chicken into his mouth. For some reason, the idea that Spider-Man could ever muster up the patience to pull a Sherlock Holmes and meticulously look for clues before he gets down to action has always been an endless source of amusement for everyone, including his enemies. Even Happy thinks it’s hilarious and the guy literally never laughs. But the Ficek case is complicated. It involves lots of bribery and lots of blackmail and if he has learned anything since he started donning spandex and looking for trouble, it’s that he shouldn’t lunge at the first person that seems or looks suspicious and the _real_ bad guys usually prefer to hide in the shadows. So what if he wants to dig a little deeper and save his energy for the people who actually deserve it?

 _I just didn’t know you’re a_ detective _now. You got a fancy trench coat and a fedora to go with your suit?_

His stomach does a somersault. These weird fucking fake memories. They keep popping up in his head even when he’s awake. Even when he isn’t sinking to the bottom of the ocean – or maybe the bottom of a lake? – like a heavy stone. He shudders. In the night, a quick glimpse at the water surface, at how it coils and foams above him, is all he gets before the current takes a hold of him and drags him further down to a place where treasures and artefacts lie half-hidden in the mucky sand: birthday cards and bits of gold and red metal, a pair of glasses that reminds him of the horn-rimmed specs his uncle used to wear. Dozens of old paperbacks, most of them Robinsonades, that have become bloated and mouldy over the course of time.

And polaroids. _So_ many polaroids.

Polaroids of May as she throws her head back in laughter, polaroids of the AcaDec team. Polaroids of Ned when he was dressed up as the Eleventh Doctor for Halloween. Polaroids of Ben flipping pancakes in the kitchen, polaroids of Tony when he wasn’t dead, and polaroids of Michelle of all people, all sleepy and dishevelled and curled up in a nest made of fairy lights and cello sheet music, looking at him like she’s been waiting for him to – 

“How do you do, fellow kids?”

He turns around in his chair, cheeks hot and skin tingling. Like a wise ancient being that’s been summoned by a bunch of crazy priests, the recurring star of his (day)dreams looms above him with a steaming cup of tea in one hand and a stack of papers in the other. Almost instantly, he’s called back to that moment she waved at him from behind her window, and his insides flip at the memory. Back then, her hair was wet and he thought she looked nice. Today, she’s wearing her hair in a chaotic low bun and he doesn’t know _what_ to think. He doesn’t know what to think of her grey leggings, black knitted sweater, or her fashionably dilapidated combat boots. He doesn’t know what to think because, like him and Ned and everyone else, Michelle Jones is probably still the same but not really.

“You’re quoting Steve Buscemi now?” Ned asks in lieu of a greeting, scrunching up his face like he’s either disgusted or just thoroughly confused. (It’s definitively the latter. He has a history of reblogging every Steve Buscemi meme he can find on his tumblr.)

“No, I’m not. I’m quoting his character from '30 Rock',” Michelle corrects him, sober and unenthused as ever. Then, she takes a sip from her tea and redirects her gaze towards Peter, “Hey, loser.”

He gulps.

“Hey, MJ.”

Her brows snap together. They’re a testament of mounting disdain. Or puzzlement. He can’t really tell what it is and he can’t really tell what would be worse.

“You lost these,” she says, placing the paper on top of his head when he doesn’t reach out to take them from her.

He blinks (twice) and it’s Ned poorly concealed snort that startles him out of his stupor and propels him to snatch the papers from his head, mildly embarrassed. It’s the syllabus and some handouts Mrs Nam must’ve given them after class. He can’t remember that he received any papers, let alone that Michelle had been there to collect them for him. Huh. Looks like his mini panic attack wasn’t so mini after all.

“Thanks.”

“Yeah.”

He takes a deep breath.

“Uh – you wanna sit with us?”

There’s a short stretch of silence that nearly drives him nuts. A short stretch of silence he spends questioning his sanity while she squints at him and Ned squints at them both. It’s terrible. It’s really, really terrible and it only gets worse when his right leg bounces upwards. His knee to slam into the underside of the table and the delayed ‘Ow’ that leaves his lips is absolutely pathetic (he knows it, Ned knows it, and, if her stern expression is anything to go by, Michelle knows it, too). But, in an unexpected twist of events, she shrugs and settles at their table.

And he likes that.

What he likes even more is that she leaves exactly two seats between herself and Ned and two seats between herself and him before she bends down to retrieve a bag of salted mini pretzels and a copy of ‘An Ocean of Minutes’ from her backpack. What he likes the most is that sitting with her like strikes him as oddly reminiscent of how they used to sit together before the Blip, except that he gets to see her from a new perspective now. And hey, wow, would you look at that? He likes this new perspective, too.

“I hope this doesn’t mean that I have to wear pink on Wednesdays.”

Ned gasps in shock.

“Why are you making pop-culture references? You never make pop-culture references! You think they’re lame and stupid!”

Michelle chooses to ignore him. She pops a pretzel into her mouth and opens her book and somehow, there’s a smile on Peter’s face when he spots the tiny handwritten notes in the margins. The annotations, corrections, and interpretative approaches she must’ve scribbled down when she read the book for the first time. There’s a smile on his face and, he thinks about the night he accidently swung by her place again. How she fussed over her plants. How _she_ smiled at _him_ for just a second and how good he felt on his way back home. How he fell asleep in record time, how he dreamed of flickering tea lights and dark blue thunderclouds, and how he woke up in the morning and, for once, didn’t feel like he was missing something the Blip had taken away from him. How he felt a little better about the fact that nothing was normal for anyone anymore.

He scrapes up the remains of his mashed potatoes. He barely notices Ned as he fails to steer her into a discussion about ‘Mean Girls’ because his mind is still stuck on that night in late August. It was a one-time event, he made sure of that. Mostly because Karen told him that wolfing down crullers and watching a classmate from across the street more than once would make him look like a pastry-loving stalker. Actually, she didn’t phrase it like that. She was way more eloquent about it. She didn’t call him a stalker, but she heavily implied that his behaviour could be deemed as ‘questionable’ to say the least. And he agreed with her. He agreed with her, wholeheartedly, and decided to focus on Harlan Ficek and his nauseating rise to fame as one of New York City’s top-tier drug lords instead.

And he’s still on that. He’s still investigating, but now he’s back in school and it’s not as easy as he thought it was going to be, but Michelle is here and she actually looks really pretty today and she picked up the papers he lost when he was freaking out over the memorial and he didn’t expect her to do that for him just like he didn’t expect her to join him and Ned for lunch because everything and everyone is different now, but she _still_ picked up the papers for him, she _still_ joined him and Ned for lunch and he’s inexplicably happy about that.

“So, how have you been?” he asks after a few minutes he spends sneaking glances at her and evading the glances Ned sneaks at him.

She shrugs.

“Everything’s kinda fucked up, but I guess I’m okay,” she says, not bothering to look up from her novel, “What about you?”

Great question. He takes a moment to watch her reach blindly for another pretzel. She misses the bag three times before she succeeds. His smile becomes wider and more genuine, and this is better, this is so much better than watching her as Spider-Man because this way, he gets to _talk_ to her, too. He fumbles with the lid of his pudding cup. It’s almost like his appetite never really abandoned him.

“I’m getting there.”

.

.

.

It all goes downhill from there. Like, he becomes better at handling his dreams and PTSD and the memorial actually _does_ get removed thanks to the student council’s perseverance and Superintendent Brown’s sense of tact, but apart from that, going to school continues to be a nerve-wracking experience because come October and he’s stumbling over his words whenever MJ – yeah, he gets to call her MJ now – dignifies him with a fraction of her attention. Because come November and every time she does as much as look at him, he feels like he’s back in Tony’s private jet, right before take-off. Because come December and he’s looking for a present for May at a craft store in Long Island City when he sees her enter the shop with some white guy in tow and hides behind the gouache aisle like a fucking coward.

Joke’s on him, though, because MJ loves to paint – especially with gouache because, as she told him a few days ago, it’s basically the perfect combination of watercolour, acrylics, and oil paint – so of course she finds him eventually. Of course, she sneaks up behind him and greets him with a punch to his upper arm. Of course, he shrieks and jumps like a scared cat. _Of fucking course_ , her smile is so lopsided and lovely that he kinda forgets how to exist for a second until her friend? chaperone? extremely attractive boyfriend she never cared to mention before? clears his throat and hurls him back into the here and now.

“You gonna introduce me to your friend, Chelle?”

He deflates a little.

 _Chelle_.

That’s a new one. That’s definitively a new one. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe her nickname system is more complicated than he thought. Maybe people who are actually important to her get to call her ‘Chelle’ instead of ‘MJ’ and maybe he should get the fuck out of here. Maybe he should stop pretending like he can’t feel a small twinge strike its roots between his ribs and maybe – _ach, screw it_. He takes in the guy and regrets it immediately. His bone structure is perfect. He’s tall and a bit lanky, but his eyes are kind and his hair looks really soft and he has several tattoos peeking out from under the sleeves and collar of his olive-green winter coat. He clearly doesn’t go to high school anymore and he radiates the kind of natural coolness Peter can only dream of, and he looks kinda familiar, which is all sorts of weird because they’ve never met before.

“Y-Yeah, sure,” MJ stutters – _stutters!!!_ – and shakes her head as if she’s trying to clear her thoughts, “Zach, this is Peter – uh – Peter, this is Zach. We’re looking for a present for my brother. You know, because it’s Christmas.”

She runs a hand through her messy curls and God, he really likes it when she’s wearing her hair like this. God, he really hates that this really cool, really hot dude – Zach. Eh. What a _stupid_ name. – gets to go Christmas shopping with her. God, he’s pretty sure he’s turned every possible shade of red by the time he’s finally able to say something intelligible in return.

“Me, too. I mean, my aunt. I’m looking for a present for my aunt. For Christmas. A-And for Hanukkah. I guess we’re not traditional about celebrating either of the two. We mostly watch movies and eat take-out, but my uncle – well, Hanukkah was his favourite holiday, sooooooo,” he drags out the vowels and rubs the back of his neck because doing something with his hands feels incredibly important all of a sudden, “Anyways, my aunt’s into all things DIY and I want to make her a calendar for the new year. With – uh – with photographs and coupons and – and stuff like that.”

So much for intelligible.

He clamps his mouth shut. This is another thing that’s been happening lately: he tends to become extra dumb in her presence, as in he ends up rambling like a maniac and it’s the worst thing ever because every time he ends up rambling like a maniac (either in front of MJ or in general), even he can hardly comprehend what he’s trying to say. Nine times out of ten, it leads to people looking at him like he’s batshit crazy, but fortunately, neither Zach nor MJ look at him like he’s batshit crazy. Instead, they look at him like they’re amused or at least impressed by his gift idea.

“Wow, that’s really thoughtful of you,” Zach practically beams at him before he puts a hand on MJ’s back, “So, how do you know my future sister-in-law? You go to school together?”

He almost does a double take because – oh.

_Ooooh._

Okay, that explains everything. Well, not _everything_ everything. It doesn’t explain why his instincts are so eager to convince him that he knows Zach from somewhere, but it explains why his instant reaction towards him – that touch of jealousy – was not only terribly misguided and uncalled-for, but also sexist as hell. Because it’s not like he has a claim on MJ or anything. Come to think of it, he doesn’t even _want_ to have a claim on her. She can do whatever she likes. She’s free and real and completely unapologetic about everything she says and does. He appreciates that. It makes going to school more bearable, rapid heartbeat and occasional bouts of motor mouth syndrome be damned. And speaking of Midtown –

“We do!” he replies, way too loudly, prompting MJ to raise a brow and a few customers to turn their heads in his direction. He pulls a face and lowers his voice, “I mean, yeah, we’re – ”

_W-We’re friends now._

He looks at her, substantially panicked. Judging by the way she’s chewing on her bottom lip and the way her eyes keep darting back and forth between him and Zach, she’s just as helpless and out of her depths as he is right now. And he gets it. She’s a very private person and this is the first time they’re interacting with each other outside of Midtown. It figures, he thinks, that she’s not too comfortable with this. So, to make things easier for her, he’s about to excuse himself when she blows out an exasperated sigh.

“We were in D.C. when Spider-Man showed up and saved our teammates,” she mumbles, crossing her arms over her chest and frowning at her shoes, “I told you about him, Z.”

This time, he _does_ a double take. If he heard her correctly (and there’s a high chance that he did), then there’s the slightest possibility that MJ has talked about him to a person she considers _family_. And that’s just wild. Like, when? Where? _Why?_ Has she told her brother about him, too? What about her parents? Do her parents know that he exists? Was their disastrous trip to Washington all she talked about or was there more? Did she also mention that they’re lunch companions? Or did she paint him as just some dork who never shows up for practice?

Oh, man. She probably complained about him being a lousy teammate. It would make sense. After all, he’s been setting a new personal record in skipping AcaDec because their new captain is an overly-confident, overly-condescending asshole who talks like a QVC host and constantly brags about his plans to go to Yale and become president or whatever. _Fuck_. It doesn’t matter what she might have said about him because for all he knows, it doesn’t mean anything. For all he knows, he’s reading too much into this. For all he knows, she doesn’t even li – 

“I see.”

There’s something about the way Zach says this that makes him feel hopeful – hopeful about what he doesn’t know. But it’s there, that feeling, deep down in his chest, warm and vibrant like a swarm of… _bees_ or something equally cute and frightening. Whatever it is, it puts him in a state he can’t quite define. Whatever it is, it’s probably something smack dab in the middle on a spectrum that ranges from brain-frying nervousness to ultimate tranquillity. Whatever it is, it keeps him calm enough to endure a few more minutes of small talk. Not that he’s good at making small talk or that MJ goes to great lengths to contribute to the conversation. She checks her text messages every now and then and lets Zach do most of the talking because he’s obviously brilliant at that.

He’s a bit like May. He knows how to engage people, how to win them over and make them feel at ease. He tells him about what it’s like to be a tattoo artist, that he proposed to MJ’s brother, Terry, on Thanksgiving, and that the three of them have been living together for a couple of years by now and somehow, he’s not too surprised by this particular revelation. (He also tells him that he got to meet Neil Gaiman at New York Comic Con once, which is arguably the coolest, most amazing thing Peter has ever heard in his entire life.

When it’s time for them to part ways, Zach claps him on the back like they’re old friends and MJ – well, MJ decides to be unnecessarily rude to him. She decides to peek over her shoulder and attack him with another half-smile and for some reason, that’s when the penny drops. For some reason, that’s when the bees in his chest relocate to his stomach and build a whole damn hive there.

.

.

.

Right on time for the new year, the Children of Thanos are back in town and even though they’ve gotten smaller in numbers, their determination to piss him off on a daily basis remains unparalleled. The fact that they feel call to _act_ on their delusions now doesn’t help either. Suffice to say that, more often than not, he returns from patrol sore and cranky and swearing like a trooper. Suffice to say that May doesn’t approve. She installs a swear jar once she catches him growl ‘Fuck Thanos and his fucking fanboys’ one evening. It’s where all his pocket money goes, but at least they’ll have the money to replace their old microwave next month.

In early February, he’s super fucking done. He spends an entire Saturday night tracking down a group of idiots who try to rob a bank in Maspeth. Here’s the kicker: they think that stealing money is something Thanos would’ve done. Because yeah, sure, aside from committing the worst genocide the universe has ever seen, his main goal was to become a fucking billionaire. Unable to decide whether he should be appalled or impressed by this kind of mental gymnastics, Peter attempts to talk some sense into them, but they’re quick to remind him that they’re deadly allergic to reason, so he webs them up and leaves them dangling upside down from a traffic light. To make things worse, his post-patrol shower becomes every cliché of a slapstick movie because he manages to squeeze a healthy amount of shampoo right into his fucking _eyes_. As a result, he nearly tears down the shower curtain and stubs his toe multiple times as he stumbles around in the bathtub and spits out obscenities that would make ‘Scarface’ guy blush like a peony.

“I didn’t sign up for this bullshit,” he whines, adding another dollar to the jar when he enters the living room, “I mean, I _did_ , but this is just fu –”

“ _Peter_.”

May shoots him a warning glare. She’s sitting cross-legged on the couch, folding laundry and watching an old episode of ‘Hell’s Kitchen’. Apparently, someone from the red team has thrown a shit ton of capellini into the trash and Gordon Ramsay is _losing his mind_ , pulling reams and reams of capellini out of the bin like it’s part of a pasta-themed magic trick. His voice is cracking, most of the competitors look like they want to die, and the music is hilariously dramatic. With a snort, Peter plops down next to his aunt, grabs a handful of socks, and begins to fold them in true Marie Kondo fashion.

“I was going to say ‘fudging unfortunate’.”

“Sure.”

“I also think it’s unfair that I don’t get to swear while other people get paid to yell the f-word every five seconds.”

“Other people don’t live under my roof.”

He leans over to kiss her cheek and her chuckle sparks a light in his chest. This is why, at the end of the day, putting up with thieves and drug lords and brainwashed cultists is worth all the stress. This is why being forced to see people when they’re at their worst doesn’t spoil his belief that, in the grand scheme of things, people are good. He gets to come _home_. He gets to change into his comfy sweats and AcaDec hoodie, gets to watch a world-class chef scream his lungs off on television with his favourite person in the whole wide world, and, to top it all off, he gets to make her laugh.

It wasn’t always like that. It took him months until he was ready to open up to her, until he felt like he could let her in on the things that had been weighing on him since he was blipped back into existence. The guilt, the grief, the anger. His inability to get over himself and move on. May took it all in stride. She cried a lot, yes, and it made him feel like a monster, but in the end, she held him together. In the end, she made him look her in the eyes and told him that there was no deadline he had to meet on his road to recovery. In the end, she made him believe her when she pulled him into her arms and said that even he, even Spider-Man, was allowed to take baby steps.

“How was patrol?”

“Annoying.”

“Are you hurt?”

“Nope,” he says, truthfully, “Just tired.”

She puts the laundry to the side and ruffles his hair. She’s always worried about him. It makes him sick to his stomach sometimes, but he knows it’s something he can’t change. He can try to make it better, though. He can try to stay true to his promise, never lie to her, and tell her about his troubles. (He hasn’t told her about the dreams yet, hasn’t found the courage to ask her if she came back with her head full of voices that shouldn’t sound as real as they do, too. But maybe he will tell her one day, maybe he will ask. As for now, he doesn’t because he wouldn’t really know where or how to begin.)

“You still up for helping out at the shelter tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. They’re all excited to meet Spider-Man in person. Especially Marshall. He’s gonna make you sign everything he owns.”

He can hear the smile in her voice and leans his head against her shoulder.

“How old is he?”

“47. Lost his business after the Snap. He used to sleep on a bench in Bowne Park for a while. We’re gonna set him up with a social worker soon, make sure he’s gonna get all the help he needs so that he can get back on his feet and find a job and a decent place to live.”

He wonders how she does it – how she can go to work, take care of him, volunteer at the homeless shelter on the weekends, and not complain or collapse in the aftermath – when he realises that she might be the strongest person he knows, and he doesn’t just admire that. He loves that about her.

And he loves _her_.

She’s his family. She held him when his parents were sent into the ground, held him when Ben was sent into the ground, held him when Tony’s first arc reactor was sent into that lake by the cottage. She cackled when she walked in on him practising corny superhero one-liners in the mirror and she let him sleep in her bed in the early days after the Blip. She raised him, she taught him to be kind. She wants him to meet the people he swore to protect because she knows that seeing their faces and hearing their stories will keep him on the ground. She knows it’ll keep him focussed. She knows it’ll keep him sane when he’s having a bad day.

He wouldn’t be Spider-Man, wouldn’t be the person he is today if it weren’t for here, and he can’t remember if he ever told her that. He can’t remember if he ever thanked her. He figures that he should. He figures that he should thank her right now, for everything, but instead – 

“I need to borrow three dollars from the jar.”

She laughs at him.

“That’s not how advance payment works, you know.”

He frowns.

“What? No. I’m not talking about the swearing – I – there’s – _ugh_ ,” he lifts his head from her shoulder and starts to squirm around. She quirks a brow at him, grins at him teasingly. _Crap_. He tugs at the hem of his hoodie, “There’s a girl.”

Within seconds, her grin goes from teasing to radiant.

“Okay.”

“Her name is MJ.”

“ _Okay_.”

He groans.

“It’s not what you think.”

“It’s not?”

“Yes,” a blink, “No,” a beat, “Let me explain.”

She looks at him, both expectantly and amused, and he wants to fling himself out of the window or disappear between the couch cushions forever because he wasn’t supposed to tell her about this tonight! He was supposed waiting a few more days to give himself a good pep talk or something like that, but now it’s out there and he might as well roll with it. He mutters under his breath. _Crap, crap, crap_.

“We share a couple of classes,” he mumbles, unsure how to elaborate and hoping against all odds that that will be enough. May tilts her head to the side as if to ask ‘And?’, so it’s obviously not enough. He scrubs a hand over his face, “She’s pretty smart. Pretty – uh – pretty cool.”

Wow.

He sounds like the least convincing hype man that has ever walked the earth and it’s not like MJ would ever need or want him to talk her up to his aunt – or anyone for that matter. She could attend a job interview for a well-paid job at a bank or a law firm (or the White House, depending on the kind of administration that’s in power) in her _gym clothes_ and walk out with a permanent employment contract in her hand. She’s self-reliant, straight to the point, and she knows how to speak for herself. It’s no secret that people are afraid of and simultaneously drawn to her because of that.

_You’re really good at this._

_I know._

_You’re good at everything._

_Duh._

A blush creeps up his neck and he can’t do anything about it. It happens all the time when he’s thinking about her these days. It happens because some part of his brain just can’t shut up about her and because of that stupid beehive in his stomach that’s been growing steadily since they ran into each other back in December. He risks a glance at May. She’s bursting with excitement, but she’s also shaking her head at him like he just said something extraordinarily stupid.

“And you want to take her on a three-dollar date?”

His blush turns into a fucking _wildfire_.

“Oh my God, no!”

“Then why –”

“Because there’s gonna be this thing at school where you can buy a rose and they’re gonna deliver it to the person you like on Valentine’s Day. It’s this ‘Hey, look, someone who’d like to remain anonymous wants to tell you that they’re into you, so here’s your lame flower’ type of thing. And – and,” he stops and squirms around on the couch some more, “And I don’t even know if MJ cares about roses. I guess she doesn’t, but it’s not like they’re gonna offer any other flowers for this thing and I can’t ask her about her favourite flower and go and buy one because then she’ll know that _I_ bought that flower for her. And I like her a lot, but I don’t want to tell her that I like her to her face. I mean, I’m _gonna_ tell her that I like to her face at _some_ point. I’m definitively gonna do that. I’m gonna tell her and it’s gonna be horrible and humiliating, but I don’t want to tell her _now_ because I want to get my shi – my _stuff_ together first.”

His speech leaves him a little winded and he’s more confused than ever when May takes his hand, squeezes his palm, and gives him the softest, mushiest look.

“Oh, Peter.”

“It’s stupid, I know. I just thought –”

“It’s not stupid at all,” she tells him, voice quivering just a bit, “I’m so happy for you.”

“Huh?”

“You’re smitten with her.”

“I – I guess?”

She brings her other hand to his cheek.

“You are.”

He can’t deny that. Otherwise, he wouldn’t’ve rambled to her about the flower thing. Otherwise, he wouldn’t’ve thought about buying a rose for MJ because it had seemed like a nice idea when he saw the posters in the hallway. Otherwise, it wouldn’t’ve become an option. Otherwise, it wouldn’t’ve become something he could actually _do_. He hangs his head, still red as beet.

“I’m scared.”

“You should enjoy it.”

“ _Why?_ ”

She smiles at him and he never wants her to stop.

“Because it’s normal, Peter.”

He swallows.

_Normal._

He ends up mulling over that word for the rest of the night. He's pretty sure that 'normal' doesn't exist, but something about it makes him emotional – in a surprisingly good way. It makes him feel less nervous about the whole Valentine’s Day situation. In fact, it makes him feel more confident about it – that is, until Monday morning when he’s standing in line at the flower booth, the three dollars May gave him stowed away in his back pocket. Because, as it happens, he’s seconds away from buying the damn rose and writing her name on the card that’s going to be attached to it for the delivery when he looks around – just in time for MJ to barge into Midtown’s entrance hall like she owns the place with her nose buried in a book and her curls bouncing with every step she takes. She doesn’t see him, but the bees start to dance anyway.

And the thing is – 

The thing is, she deserves more than a stupid flower and a stupid card. She deserves him being able to do the bare minimum and tell her about his feelings in person. She deserves actual words coming out of his mouth. It’s what’s gotten him into this mess in the first place. He woke up and realised that he prefers talking to her over watching her from a safe distance. So, that’s what he should do. He should talk to her when he’s ready. He should take the time he needs.

_I just wish we had more time._

_Me, too._

He doesn’t buy her a rose. He retreats from the booth and ignores the confused looks he receives. He walks up to her, walks _with_ her, grins when she flips him off, and asks her about her weekend. He tries not to stare at her for too long when she tells him that she went to Socrates Sculpture Park to draw, that she watched a documentary about Elizabeth Short, and that the Black Dahlia murder is now her _favourite_ murder.

“I didn’t even know that having a favourite murder is a thing.”

“Well, now you do, loser.”

She rolls her eyes at him and for a second, he can see himself fall in love with her. The thought doesn’t last long, but it almost makes him trip over his feet, so he grabs the straps of his backpack to steady himself while she gives him a spontaneous lecture on why murder mysteries and whodunits are going to make a comeback in the movie industry soon.

Later that day, when he’s on his way back home, he makes a quick stop at a flower shop and uses the three dollars to buy a carnation for May. (It’s the least he can do for not going through with his plan.) He decides to keep the bit about MJ’s favourite murder in mind, though. Maybe it’ll come in handy one day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know i haven’t said it often enough in the past, but thank you for reading my stuff and thank you for the kudos, comments, and bookmarks. it’s cool to know that some people enjoy my writing even though my english can be rubbish at times.
> 
> also: i read somewhere that carnations are the official mother’s day flower. i thought it would be sweet to have peter buy a carnation for may on a regular day instead… because mothers deserve flowers every single day of the year imo.
> 
>  _also_ also: i have a [new tumblr account](https://befehlvonganzunten.tumblr.com) because my old one stopped working for some reason. don’t worry, though. it’s still a pseudo-artsy cesspool where i mostly reblog gifs and lame language puns.
> 
> stay safe and see you next time :)


	8. epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i don’t know what happened. i’m, like, the slowest writer in the universe, but i guess reading your comments on the previous chapter gave me a huge 'writing boost'. (i also had a couple of days off, which was quite convenient.) 
> 
> with that being said: thank you for the kind words and please enjoy some silly yet well-deserved fluff.

He takes her to Prom with a black eye and his right arm in a sling. (Fuck Scorpion.) His suit is rumpled, his hair is a fucking disaster, and he’s a little high on the pain meds they gave him at the hospital. He’s also a little high on his girlfriend because she’s gorgeous in her dark green dress. She’s wearing the necklace and she’s wearing _heels_ , too, and the fact that they give her a few more inches on him than usual makes him feel things he can’t say out loud while they’re among their friends and classmates, so he decides to tell her when they’re in her bed roughly two and a half hours later.

“You’re an idiot,” she sighs, eyes sparkling in the soft glow of her fairy lights. She changed into her sleeping clothes as soon as they made it to her room after promising Zach and Terry that there was going to be no ‘funny business’ tonight. Naturally, neither the boxer shorts nor the black t-shirt that says, ‘Nicest Asshole’ in thin white letters derogate from how beautiful she looks, how much he wants to be with her every single second of every single day, and how absolutely _gone_ he is for her at this point.

“Yeah, well. We been knew,” he says, groggily.

She cracks up in a way only he and a few other people are allowed to witness, snorting and dissolving into giggles with her forehead pressed against his temple and one hand splayed over his chest. She was so gentle with him when she helped him out of his suit and into his own t-shirt and boxer shorts combo, so careful not to hurt him when she put his arm back into the sling. They both know that his bones will be good as new in a day or two, but it’s nice that she wants to take care of him anyway. He lets his head roll to the side and steals a kiss from her. It’s short and sweet. He can’t believe that this is life now.

It’s funny how Beck’s plan to poison the world against him eventually gave Peter a solid safety net. Because sure, he could’ve done without the Bugle and the smear campaigns and Kraven and the months he had to spend hiding in New Asgard, but in the end, he got to set things right and he didn’t have to do it alone. He had his friends – in New York, in New Asgard, and in the courtroom. He had May, Ned, and MJ who stood by him and fought for him even when he tried to push them away to protect them. He had Flash who threw himself into a twitter feud with every person who dared to believe that Spider-Man was a murderer. He had Valkyrie and Korg who made him feel less homesick every now and then. He had Mr Murdock and Mr Nelson who supported him during his trial. He had Pepper, Happy, and Rhodey who, when it was finally over, taught him how to handle the attention.

“I was kinda surprised by the lack of paparazzi tonight,” MJ muses after a while, smiling when he lifts his uninjured hand to cover hers, “It’s good, though, right?”

“Honestly? I’ve been waiting for the hype to die down.”

“Yeah?”

He weaves their fingers together and brings them to his lips.

“Yeah,” he says with a grin, “Now I can take you on a date like a normal person.”

She regards him for a moment and his grin doesn’t falter. Her gaze is calculating. She’s going to mock him, any second now.

“So, no more clumsy make out sessions on random rooftops in the middle of the night?”

A laugh slips out of him and, as adorable as her fake pout is, he has to kiss it away immediately. Kissing her is his favourite thing to do, so why _shouldn’t_ he do it at any given opportunity? She seems to agree with him on that. She hums against his mouth and the sound strikes him deep down in his groin, prompting him to try and reach out for her with his bad hand and to let out a curse when the sling doesn’t cooperate. (Seriously. _Fuck Scorpion_.) The feeling of her lips parting and her tongue curling against his has a similar effect on him. Of course, it’s just a far cry from the primordial need that shook through him that one time they got each other off with their hands in a broom closet at Flash’s birthday party, but to have her like this, to kiss her like this – it’s fucking amazing nonetheless.

In fact, it’s almost _too_ fucking amazing. Zach likes him well enough, but Terry’s still a bit sceptical, still a bit reserved around him. He’s her brother after all, and he didn’t get to meet Peter until after the big secret was out. Needless to say that he wasn’t exactly thrilled when he learned that his little sister was dating the world’s most chaotic superhero. He pulls away reluctantly, a tiny frustrated noise climbing up his throat.

“Nah, we’re gonna keep doing that.”

He’s breathless, _brainless_.

She smirks at him.

“Cool.”

Sometimes, he’s convinced that the phantom loss he experienced after the Blip is somehow connected to her. That they were stuck in the same place while they were gone and that his dreams are rooted in a span of time, a shred of reality, that was cut off from his memory by accident. It’s sounds like a fairy tale or some ridiculous story about star-crossed lovers, but it makes sense to him. It feels real, even more so when he catches her do or say things that make him believe that she can feel it, too. Like, when she produces landscape paintings of wide lakes under deep red skies or arms of ghost white fog that twist through abandoned streets without really planning to. When she flinches at the sound of thunder or when they’re tangled up in her bed and she has her hands in his hair, scratching his scalp lightly until they’re both asleep.

He told her about it after the trial. About his dreams and those moments he swears he can hear her voice in his head even when she’s not around. She joked about it, asked him if he walked into a door again or if he was trying to be romantic. When she looked at him and realised that he was being serious, though, the lightness in her voice morphed into something more sincere – and while she didn’t confess to him that she could hear his voice, too, she did tell him that she believed him.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks.

He drops his forehead against hers, bravely affronting the possibility that he’s going to wake up with a stiff neck if he falls asleep like this, and he breathes her in. She smells like coconut, cedar wood, and lily of the valley. His eyelids flutter and her hand is warm against the side of his neck.

“You.”

She doesn’t roll her eyes, doesn’t call him out him for being excessively sappy tonight. She smiles at him like she did on Tower Bridge and he smiles right back at her, thwacked upside the head by his own damn happiness. Back then, that initial press of her lips made him feel as if he was being nudged in the right direction by a light breeze or a slow water stream. It felt good, it felt natural, it felt like something that had been bound to happen eventually, and he’s delighted by the prospect that it could always be like this between them even if it won’t always be easy to keep it that way. He’s delighted even though being in love for the first time, no matter how intense and life-altering it may be, comes with a heavy load of stress and anxiety.

He’s delighted by everything about her and what being with her could look like in the future. And he’s proud of her, so proud that she made it into the college that has always ranked at the top of her list. He’s proud of her, he’s happy for her. He’s happy for Ned, too, because he’s going to kill it at MIT and he’s happy for May because, after years of mourning Ben, she took the risk and fell in love again. He’s happy for himself even if there used to be a time when he expected his life to go a completely different, much less complicated way.

“School’s gonna suck without you and Ned.”

She rubs his jaw with her thumb.

“You don’t know that.”

“I’m gonna be all alone,” he insists, “Like, I can’t believe I’m gonna have to repeat another school year. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m gonna graduate from college at 40.”

She snickers into the space between them.

“You’re a drama queen.”

“I’m being realistic!”

“You’re Spider-Man,” she says, “People are crazy about you. You’re gonna make new friends in no time. And you’re gonna graduate _before_ you’re 40. I’m gonna make sure of that.”

“I don’t want any new friends, but thank you for saying that.”

She sighs and he kisses the corner of her mouth. He kinda doesn’t want this moment to end. He wants to stay here forever or fast forward to when they’re both students at Columbia, cramming for tests in the library, making out in the back of a Greyhound bus to Boston on a rainy Friday night, and spending their other weekends in bed together because college parties are overrated.

He blushes.

He wants her. He’s spent unreasonable amounts of time thinking about how much he wants her. About _how_ he wants her and _where_. About what he wants to do with her and what he wants her to do with him. About the noises she’ll make. _Jesus_. He wants her so bad, but May is right: he’s allowed to take it slow. He doesn’t have to rush through their relationship and drag MJ along because he’s scared of losing her on the way.

“I love you,” he whispers. Objectively, there’s no reason for him to speak to her so quietly all of a sudden, but he’s doing it anyway, “You know that, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

“And I love you, too, so you don’t have to worry that I’m gonna drop you for some snobby college dude. Or girl,” she tugs at his earlobe, a tired but fond expression criss-crossing her face, “You make me, like, stupidly happy.”

“You make me stupidly happy, too.”

He doesn’t miss a beat and the spark in her eyes makes his heart sing, swell, and stutter all at once. He shuffles closer until their faces are basically smashed together. Her breath fans over his skin and he goes slack in her arms. He’s exhausted. He’s exhausted from fighting another costumed idiot, exhausted from taking selfies with the hospital staff. He’s exhausted from rushing to her place to pick her up and from attending Prom, but he’s not exhausted from fawning over the girl of his dreams. He’s _never_ exhausted from loving her, never exhausted from say it out loud. He’s never exhausted from her wit, her beauty, or the fact that she has a strong opinion about literally everything and everyone. If possible, these things about her make him feel more alive.

“Go to sleep, loser.”

She yawns into his cheek and holds him a little tighter. She turns into an octopus at night, wrapping her limbs around him and covering his body like a blanket. He loves it, likes to tease her about it sometimes, too, but she’s never embarrassed. She just shrugs and tells him that she likes being close to him, especially when he decides to swing by after patrol. It keeps her from worrying too much.

He listens to her breath as it evens out and the little snores that leave her a few minutes later. He smiles to himself and blinks at her ceiling. They’re going to join May and Happy at the shelter tomorrow. Ned’s going to be there as well. He’s excited about it. It’s something that became incredibly important to him – not because he likes it when people go out of their way to celebrate him, but because it’s the most grounding part of his job. It makes him better at pretty much everything he does and gives him a clearer understanding of what helping others and having responsibilities actually means.

Still smiling, he keeps the lights on and kisses her forehead before he finally drifts away into sleep. She’s going to complain about it in the morning since she doesn’t approve of wasting electricity, but he’ll find a way to make it up to her. He’ll go down on her or take her to her favourite breakfast place or maybe he’ll just sit back and let her educate him with his heart playing pinball in his chest and a big stupid grin on his face because in truth, kissing her is his _second_ favourite thing to do.

In truth, his first favourite thing to do, the thing he wants to do for the rest of his life if she’ll let him, is learning from her. It’s falling in love with her all over again every time they talk to each other. It’s looking at her and knowing that they can take their time because, for once, they _have_ time. For once, they’re here, they’re together, and they have all the time they need.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welp. here we are. 
> 
> i have to say that i had a blast writing this thing (even though it took me an eternity to finish it). it’s probably the weirdest fic i’ve written so far, but i’m super happy that so many people found it entertaining. it’s really cool to be a teeny-tiny part of this fandom.
> 
> p.s.: the 'nicest asshole' t-shirt is a [real thing](https://wearyoutry.com/product/nicest-asshole-t-shirt/).


End file.
